Good as her Word: Selected Journalism. Lorna Sage

Carter, ‘Notes from the Front Line’, 1983

      Angela made parenthood her theme in her last novel, Wise Children – parenthood of all sorts, literary, literal and lateral (twins as mirrors to each other). She’d also had her son, Alexander, at the last minute in 1983. Alex was perhaps partly responsible for the long gap between this novel and its predecessor (seven years), but it had always taken her a long time to ‘gestate’ the next because she was original, always moving on and changing. She didn’t think there was anything Mythological about that: Wise Children in fact is all about coming from the wrong side of the tracks to claim kin with Shakespeare, traditionally one of the favourite examples of mythic fatherhood.

      She had long before used pregnancy as a plot device, a way of ending a novel: first in Heroes and Villains (1969) and then in New Eve very elaborately indeed, so that it turns into an evolutionary re-run, with branches of the family tree for archaeopteryx and other intermediate beings missed out first time round. She had trouble with endings once she had taken to using the picaresque format of allegorical travels, and wanted them to stay ‘open’. And it wasn’t too different with her life. She and Mark Pearce had ‘settled down’ over the years, but in a most vagrant fashion. She travelled all over the place for jobs, residencies, tours; the Clapham house was always being changed around (her friend Christine moved out quite shortly), and was never finished. ‘At home’ they cooked, decorated, gardened, collected cats, kites, prints, paintings, gadgets, all piecemeal. The house became filled with the jetsam of their enthusiasms. Mark worked as a potter for a while and made plates that were beautiful but also enormous, so that they hardly fitted on the makeshift kitchen table and you felt like a guest at a giants’ feast. The two of them took to wearing identical military surplus greatcoats outdoors, announcing their unanimity and accentuating their height. Domestically they communed in silence, which was very much Mark’s speciality, though she was pretty good at it too. They conspired to present their relationship as somehow sui generis, like a relation between creatures of different species who both happened to be tall. They had nothing much conventionally ‘in common’ except that they were both eccentric, stubborn, intransigent, wordlessly intimate.

      She didn’t, I’m sure, study to conceive, but simply found herself pregnant and decided to go ahead with it. An aged primagravida, she joked, but obviously her condition underlined the difference in their ages and made her granny disguise all the more outrageous. That November, in her last weeks of pregnancy and on the day after she had helped to judge the Booker Prize (which went to J. M. Coetzee), she developed high blood pressure and was hospitalized. From hospital she wrote me a furious letter:

      My blood pressure rating has not been improved by my second run-in with the consultant obstetrician. Every time I remember what she said, I feel raptly incredulous and racked by impotent fury. Although at the time I said nothing, because I could not believe my ears.

      So she says: ‘How are you feeling?’

      ‘Fine but apprehensive,’ I say, ‘not of the birth itself but of the next 20 years.’

      ‘How is your husband feeling?’ she asked.

      I paused to think of the right way of putting it and she said quickly: ‘I know he’s only your common-law husband.’

      While I was digesting this, she pressed down on my belly so I couldn’t move and said:

      ‘Of course you’ve done absolutely the right thing by not having an abortion but now is the time to contemplate adoption and I urge you to think about it very seriously.’

      That is exactly what she said! Each time I think about it, the adrenalin surges through my veins. I want to kill this woman. I want the BMA to crucify her. I want to rip out her insides.

      Anyway, then she said: ‘Its [sic] policy of the hospital to put older women into hospital for the last two weeks of pregnancy and I’ll be generous, you can go home to collect your nightie & be back in an hour.’

      Nobody had told me about this policy before & I feel she may have made it up on the spur of the moment. Needless to say, she then buggered off back to her private practice. Was she being punitive? Why didn’t I kick her in the crotch, you may ask. Why didn’t I cry, shreik [sic] & kick my heels on the ground, demanding she be forthwith stripped of her degrees & set to cleaning out the latrines. Why did I come in, after all that! Everybody else in this hospital is so nice & kind & sensible & sympathetic. There would have been a round of applause if I’d kicked her in the crotch. But, anyway, it turns out that I’m not in here for nothing—this ward is full of women with high blood pressure, swollen feet & the thing they make you collect your piss for, the dreaded protein in the urine. The doctor who looked at me today said they all spent a lot of time patching things up after my consultant, who is evidently famed for making strong women break down. Evidently I can agitate to go home again on Monday if my blood pressure has gone down.

      ‘What about the consultant’s weekly clinic?’ I said, because I’m supposed to go to it.

      ‘Dodge her,’ the doctor said. The doctor is a slip of a right-on sister young enough to be my daughter. The consultant is a Thatcher-clone – evidently a Catholic, I’m told – old enough to be my mother. I am the uneasy filling in this sandwich.

      A good example, this, of the way motherhood is used as a means of denying a woman’s own meanings, taking away her choices, extruding her from normality’s roster. Actually, the birth went all right, and despite the seemingly inevitable hospital infection, Angela was able to rejoice from the beginning in Alex’s Caravaggiesque beauty. But you can see how hard it was for her, at times, to make up her life as she went along. The writing in this letter belongs to a genre she disliked – the low mimetic, the language that reproduces the world. Small wonder she preferred surreal transformations, nothing to do with autobiography or confession or testament. But that seeming impersonality was, I’m arguing, entirely personal at base – a refusal to be placed or characterized or saved