Authors: Rachel Cusk
Then, suddenly, things change. It is February and the days are brief and pale, the nights deep and dark as lakes. The year is creaking on its hinges: soon it will open and let in the light of spring. I have been waiting for this light as for the signal of my readiness, but it never comes. A month of pregnancy remains, and I begin to bleed. I report it to the midwife and against my protests she takes me to the hospital. Once there I am taken to the ultrasound room. A crowd gathers around my prone body. The snowy images appear once more on the screen. The sonographer leans forward, clicks at her keyboard, scrutinises. It's unbelievable, she announces baldly. The consultant also leans forward. They probe the screen with disbelieving fingers. It's all the wrong way round, says the sonographer. The placenta is completely blocking the cervix. The baby can't come out. See? She addresses this to me. Attentively, obediently, I look, and see something black and swirling that resembles outer space. A murmur of outrage goes up. This should have been spotted earlier. It is a life-threatening condition. Had I gone ahead with my plans to have the baby at home, I am told, we would both have died. I look at the screen while they discuss it. The scanner has wandered slightly in the sonographer's distracted hand, and suddenly, out of the darkness, the sleeping face of my daughter emerges. It fills the screen, pale and tranquil as a moon, ethereal as a ghost. It is the face of a person, not putative but real, hovering, coming in, waiting to exist. No one else notices it. The sonographer gestures in the air with the scanner and it is gone.
I am told I must now remain in hospital. Rebelliously, desperately, I discharge myself and go home. The next day I come back and surrender. It is a Sunday evening. The hospital is dark and deserted, as if its customers observed office hours. A militant junior doctor keen to practise inserting things into veins falls upon me hungrily. She offers blood tests, the implantation of a canula. I refuse them. Quietly enraged, she disappears and returns with back-up. It is explained to me that I must undergo these procedures. I argue and eventually submit to the blood tests alone. The junior doctor stabs the needle into my arm as if she were playing championship darts. Then she stabs it into the other arm. Blood seeps under the skin to form two large red patches, like birthmarks, up my arms. Chastened, I am put to bed in a ward. I spend the next three days there, and am visited by gangs of junior doctors who have heard about the canula incident and want to exact revenge. I fight them off. Eventually a tall, kind girl comes to my bed late one night. Let's just put it in, shall we? she says. I concede my hand, and she pushes the valve into a vein on the back of it and goes away. The consultant comes to see me. He has a jolly, Tyrolean look about him. If you'd been born a hundred and fifty years ago, he says, you'd be dead by now. I reply that most people would and he laughs uncomprehendingly. I am to have a Caesarean section. Which day would you like it? he asks with a smile. I opt for Wednesday. I ask whether the baby is ready to be removed and am assured that it is. He has delivered babies like kittens, like feathers, like thoughts, babies that hardly exist. I sense he would like them not to be in there in the first place, but to grow them himself in a seed tray. Mine has had eight months, apparently a decadent quantity of time for this hospital.
The other women in the ward are having Caesareans too. There is no groaning or tearing of hair. Each morning, one or two of them leave the ward on foot and are wheeled back an hour or so later carrying babies. They are taken to other rooms. Now that I have been given a day, an hour and a demarcated sphere of anxiety, I grow mute and limp with acceptance. I recognise this clinical, timetabled world as my destined place. I laugh at my flirtation with natural birth as if at a strange dream or delusion. The anaesthetist comes to visit. General or local? General, I say immediately. He persuades me to accept double local. People are rude about you in theatre when you're under general, he says. You'll be glad afterwards, he adds as he leaves. For three days I eat nothing, read nothing, think nothing. Outside the weather is pellucid, beautiful. Through the windows the world seems stalled and peaceful. I feel as if I am at the end of my life, drifting in a hushed, airy limbo. When Wednesday comes, I make panicked telephone calls at dawn in a spasm of terror. I return to bed and a nurse comes. She is not on a round: she has come for me. Birth has me within its sights. She ministers to my body, preparing it as if for burial. How are you today? she says as she works. Then she leaves me alone. Presently a midwife comes. They're ready for you, she says. We get in a lift and descend two floors. We weave our way along corridors, turning left and right. Then we push through double doors and enter the operating theatre, a room that reminds me uncannily of pictures I have seen of execution chambers. In its centre, like an altar, is the operating table. The room is filled with people in masks. As soon as they see me they surge forward, taking my arms, pressing hands against my back, bearing me like a strong current towards the operating table. I am sat on it and immediately am assailed from all sides. Someone is injecting something into my hand. A group behind me are injecting something into my back. I look down to see a giant, three-pronged valve being pushed bloodily into a vein. I don't know to which front to send my defences, where to concentrate my powers of endurance, and so I give up and hang my head. Presently I realise that I am now lying on the table. The attendants are heaving my body from side to side. A cloth screen is erected over my chest. Somebody sprays a blast of something cold on to my skin. Can you feel that? he shouts. Yes, I shout back. And that? Yes! This seems a worryingly primitive procedure. I hope that he's heard me. A woman is holding my head, a hand over each of my ears. She removes one hand to tell me that they have made the incision. There is some tugging and pushing and wiggling, which I feel through a thick blanket of anaesthetic. Everyone is talking. A radio is playing and a man is singing along to the music. The woman goes away. I can see my own face reflected in the broad lamp above me. I look at the clock and see that only ten minutes have passed since I left the ward. What's happening? I say. My voice sounds preternatural coming out of my dead body. I fear suddenly that I have been forgotten, that I am going to be left dismantled, a talking head on a table. I fear that my soul is being uncaged and allowed to fly away. Nobody replies to my question. Some transfer of significance has occurred: I feel it, feel the air move, feel time begin to pour down a new tributary. The world adjusts itself. The doctors hold the baby up over the screen so that I can see her. She is livid and blue and her face is a rictus of shock and fear. I recognise her immediately from the scan. Only I knew the secret of her tranquillity, the floating world of her gestation. She is borne off to the far side of the room, away from me, and as if she were a light I fall deeper into shadow the further away she goes. The midwives crowd around her. I lose sight of her but her cries reach me like messages. Presently she emerges clothed and wrapped in a blanket. Her father takes her and holds her. His offers of friendship must suffice, must compensate for her lack of proper passage, for the clock of experience has started ticking and won't wait for me. Her life has begun.
Edith Wharton's 1905 novel
The House of Mirth
asks the question of what a woman is if she is not a wife, a mother, a daughter. Wharton herself was none of these things. She married, a marriage of class and convenience, but lived separately, estranged, and finally on a different continent from her husband. Her parents were dead. She had no children. Her right to exist derived from her wealth, inherited and then earned by her writing. Latterly she had a large collection of lapdogs, to whom she was obsessively devoted, and she found philanthropy: living in France during the First World War, she set up refuges and schools for orphaned children.
Lily Bart, the heroine of
The House of Mirth
, is an orphan. The story of her life corresponds inversely to that of Wharton's, like the negative of a photograph. Lily's parents died leaving her penniless. She has neither education nor talents nor training. She is very beautiful; a beauty cultivated to fetch a price by a mother who died before she could oversee the sale. Lily has been abandoned to her vanity like the hothouse flower her name suggests left out in the cold and rain. The only thing she knows how to do is to exist, beautifully; to be an asset to a room, an arm, a buttonhole. She spends her time subsisting in the borrowed water of others' wealth, moving from country house to country house, always on the brink of outright penury and utterly vulnerable to falling out of fashion. Other women's husbands pursue her: she packs her bags and moves on to the next party. Wives and rivals turn jealous: she finds new friends, anyone with the hospitality to ensure her survival. She works harder than a skivvy at tact, flattery and charm, but trouble pursues her. Wealthy suitors somehow melt away from her grasp. Rumour sticks to her. Time waits on her, running its fingers over her pretty face. She meets a man called Lawrence Seldon, a poor, cultivated lawyer to whom she is strongly attracted, but their mutual prejudice divides them. She has been programmed to find material meaning for herself; he, in what is itself a form of vanity, to disdain vanity and greed; and yet he haunts her as she finally descends into poverty and social ignominy, haunts her with the suspicion that there was something else, that she stood at the door to a different realm of being and did not open it. On her way home one night to the squalid New York boarding house where she has finally fetched up, she meets a servant-girl to whom she once, in better days, showed charity. Shocked by Lily's haggard appearance, the girl invites her home to warm herself. In her firelit kitchen is a baby, which Lily is given to hold. Later that night, beset by exhaustion, illness and hunger, utterly alone, Lily accidentally takes an overdose of laudanum; and as she dies, the baby returns to her as a strange hallucination.
Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to Lily. She had had a premonition of it in the blind motions of her mating-instinct; but they had been checked by the disintegrating influences of the life about her. All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening in Nettie Struther's kitchen.
The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up the fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them, seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the frail audacious permanence of a bird's nest built on the edge of a cliff â a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safety over the abyss â¦
Tonight the drug seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to be stilled in turn, and it was long before she felt them dropping into abeyance, like sentinels falling asleep at their posts. But gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her ⦠Tomorrow would not be so difficult after all: she felt sure that she would have the strength to meet it. She did not quite remember what it was that she had been afraid to meet, but the uncertainty no longer troubled her. She had been unhappy and now she was happy â she had felt herself alone, and now the sense of loneliness had vanished.
She stirred once, and turned on her side, and as she did so, she suddenly understood why she did not feel herself alone. It was odd â but Nettie Struther's child was lying on her arm: she felt the pressure of its little head against her shoulder. She did not know how it had come there, but she felt no great surprise at the fact, only a gentle penetrating thrill of warmth and pleasure. She settled herself into an easier position, hollowing her arm to pillow the round downy head, and holding her breath lest a sound should disturb the sleeping child.
As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she must tell Seldon, some word she had found that should make life clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on the far edge of thought â she was afraid of not remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and say it to him, she felt that everything would be well.
Slowly the thought of the word faded, and sleep began to enfold her. She struggled faintly against it, feeling that she ought to keep awake on account of the baby; but even this feeling was gradually lost in an indistinct sense of drowsy peace, through which, of a sudden, a dark flush of loneliness and terror tore its way.
She started up again, cold and trembling with the shock: for a moment she seemed to have lost her hold of the child. But no â she was mistaken â the tender pressure of its body was still close to hers: the recovered warmth flowed through her once more, she yielded to it, sank into it, and slept.
The baby is the symbol not just of Lily's exclusion from the human life-cycle, nor of the vulnerability, the helplessness that marks her life and her life's end: it is also the vision of her squandered femininity, a ghostly image of mother and child, their bodies entwined, rising from the brittle, broken shell of her useless beauty. Through this image Lily finally finds the physical warmth, the closeness, the commitment that has been lacking in her relationships with men. There lay words, banter, bridled lust, gossip, calculation and adornment, all artifice-bright: here are love and responsibility, resolution, provision, peace, and the mercy of sleep and darkness that veils for a moment the prospect of death. It is not to the image of Lawrence Seldon that her frustrated body cleaves in its last hour: it is not sex â not commerce â but possession for which finally she yearns, possession of a living thing. Of all the many houses through which she has passed, the grand, cruel cattle-markets of men and women, exquisitely furnished with betrayal, boredom, greed and desire, it is only in this last, poor place that she finds something she can for a moment possess.