Small was an aloof man, and his father had been the first one to settle on Campbell’s Reach. He wore a grey flannel sweatshirt and had been gassed in the First War and may have seen the toppled Cathedral of Reims, no longer available for the coronation of slack boys or the eyes of the devout. Yet all he ever said was, ‘You father’ll have to do something about that south fence. My bulls wander over. They get tired. And the danger of bloat.’ And Barbara would say that yes, but it’s awfully hard to sink fence posts there, they drift loose every time it rains.

  On Friday afternoons, matrons of proven deformity or malaise infested Dr Patricia Fleming’s waiting-room. They sat making low conversation or perhaps not even moving, though they each seemed on the point of saying, ‘Of course you can be so much more open with a lady doctor, you can raise all the questions you want to.’

  An old lady who came to Dr Fleming regularly (‘for my needle’) filled in the outlines for Barbara. ‘Dr Fleming’s pretty direct. Calls a spade a bloody shovel, you know. But she’s terribly kind.’

  Frightened, Barbara had to work up spittle to manage a reply. If Dr Fleming was so adroit at recognizing garden implements, how might she perform at reading especial signs from women’s bodies?

  *

  SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE LIFE OF JEHANNE D’ARQUE

  There is thought to be a deformity of a woman’s body called the mark of the beast. No one ever seemed to know what it was, but most women seemed convinced they would know it if they saw it.

  Of course it was looked for on Jehanne’s body.

  Jehanne had to put up with many examinations, which must all have made her nervous. The first time it was the wife of the Governor of Chinon, Madame de Gaucourt, and also Madame de Treves. This examination was made in the tower Jehanne had been given as her quarters, a tower of many one-room floors one on top of another, so that she might have thought she was starting to have some influence on the officials of the court. In fact, of course, she had to let them examine her, because she was a prisoner and knew there were many priests and others these old noblewomen had to report to.

  The next time they looked at her was at Tours. She was all in a sweat to get on to Orléans with an army, but they made her answer questions from priests again, and then more women were appointed to find if she was a boy or a girl, and if she was a girl, did she have the mark, and if she didn’t, was she a virgin? This time it was the Queen of Sicily, the Dauphin’s mother-in-law, who led the committee. Surely Jehanne was afraid. Maybe she wondered if you could have the mark through no fault of your own. And none of these old women had lived very pure lives. Who knows what mark they might see or think they’d seen?

  The third time was by the English woman, the Duchess of Bedford, when Jehanne was the prisoner of the English. That must have been the worst. Perhaps the Duke had tried to bully his wife into saying she’d seen the mark, or had seen that Jehanne was not a virgin. They say the Duke of Bedford watched the whole thing through a spy hole.

  Anyhow, the Duchess told the truth. I suppose that’s all I can ask of Dr Fleming.

  *

  The doctor was a thin woman with a sad, pretty face. She had picked up a male brusqueness in her basically male profession.

  ‘Well, Miss Glover,’ she called with a special warmth, as if she had been expecting Barbara for some months. ‘What’s been happening to you?’

  It became clear that she considered womanhood a manifold disease, and it was all just a matter of what form of infection you had.

  ‘I think there’s something wrong.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Something gynaecological? Woman’s trouble?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Poor bloody woman, eh? Do you think you’re carrying a child?’

  ‘No. I bleed,’ Barbara hurriedly contributed.

  ‘Christ, I should hope so. Are you regular?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, we’d better have a look. Get much pain?’

  She was grateful for the proffered symptom. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Listen, something’s on your mind. Usually girls who are vague are plain pregnant. What is it?’

  It was necessary to work up spittle with the tongue to make an answer. ‘I think there might be something wrong. Some mark on me.’

  ‘Wait on,’ said Dr Fleming with all her male harshness. ‘You’re not from that bloody Christian Motherhood crowd, are you?’

  Barbara’s mouth flew open, her mind emptied. Christian Motherhood was a crime she had not expected to be accused of.

  ‘Smells just like them,’ the doctor said, towering at her desk. ‘They’ve been trying to set me up for years, bloody old sows. Mrs Sharp! Mrs Sharp!’ Her eyes shone with a businesslike vindictiveness. ‘We’ll have a witness in.’

  But before Mrs Sharp could leave the reception desk, Barbara had begun to shake her head in bafflement and tremble with defeat. The raucously sensitive doctor began to shout again. ‘No, it’s all right. Stay there, Mrs Sharp. Stay there.’

  ‘What do you mean by a mark?’ she murmured.

  Barbara knew she’d have to be explicit, unless she wanted Mrs Sharp called in again.

  ‘My parents are sick. They say that I’m to blame for bringing the sickness on. They think it has something to do with my womb because my first bleed brought it on.’

  Dr Fleming ground her forehead into the palm of her left hand. ‘That’s impossible! Absolutely impossible. God, sometimes I think we’re in the 1400s and they only put 1969 on the newspapers to fool us.’

  ‘Well,’ said Barbara, ‘I know they examined Jehanne… Joan of Arc, you know…to see if she had any marks on her body —’

  ‘The mark of the beast?’ the doctor asked in a shriek.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘God! Firstly, your parents are wrong. Can you get them to come and see me?’

  ‘I might be able to.’

  ‘Listen.’ The doctor moved up and down the surgery at a speech-making pace. ‘Firstly, there’s no such thing as the mark of the beast. Womanhood is the mark of the beast, if you want to know. To be born a woman is to be at bay, a hunted beast from day one. A woman isn’t a two-legged baby-bearing animal. A woman, if you want my opinion, is a state of crucifixion. All right. You can undress.’

  Still, when the examination was made, Barbara, staring down past the ruck of her blouse, waited for the moment when Doctor Fleming would recoil in honest revulsion. The moment failed to come.

  ‘Everything is normal, dear. All perfectly good. You keep yourself clean. And that’s a very good idea. Do you have any abnormal pains, discomfort?’

  ‘No,’ Barbara said doubtfully.

  ‘Listen, tell me what the truth is, not what you think I ought to hear.’

  ‘I feel a kind of wave in my stomach. Sometimes. Like electricity.’

  Dr Fleming smiled, almost regretfully. ‘That’s perfectly natural.’ She faced Barbara. ‘Hop down.’ Even her perfume had a professional heaviness to it. With her mouth screwed up into one corner of her face, she seemed to Barbara to be taking stock of her own womanhood.

  ‘Got a boyfriend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You say you come from Campbell’s Reach?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Clearly, the doctor surmised the worst of Campbell’s Reach. She said, ‘I think you ought to have a small medical aid inserted in you. There’s no charge for this medical aid, they’re supplied free. But you must come back to me next month. You understand.’

  Barbara knew the doctor was lying about no charge, but didn’t want to hurt her or forestall the hard reverence with which she drew a plastic glove from a dispenser and took up the wire diaphragm from one of her cupboards.

  ‘This won’t hurt,’ she muttered, and glanced at Barbara’s face for a second during which Barbara was surprised by a shiver of ambient sisterhood, because her body was of a startling importance to this suddenly saintly bowed head, was an object of service and compassion, and if a wound, then an honourable one.

  ‘I should be serving you,’ she would have liked to tell the bent, intent head—though she knew Dr Fleming wouldn’t have stood for it. ‘This is my bleeding, open body that you respect,’ she wanted to tell the woman. ‘Are you sure you’re seeing it correctly?’

  ‘One thing’s certain,’ Dr Fleming muttered. ‘Your parents are completely wrong.’

  But there were marks and marks, Barbara knew. It was, at the least, a comfort to know she had no certifiable ones.

  On a Friday six weeks later, when Mr Small had brought Barbara home from her shopping, she visited her parents and, by mistake, left her mail with her mother. Returning to the barn for it a little later, she found her mother there alone and all the mail opened. She did not complain; piracy of letters was an occasional aberration of her mother’s, and perhaps necessary for her health.

  Among the letters the mother had illicitly read was one from Dr Fleming. It said:

  Dear Miss Glover,

  You have failed to return to me for further treatment. I told you definitely a month, and I believe it’s very much to your welfare to have the device replaced, since, if it remains in place much longer, there is a strong danger of infection or sickness.

  There will of course be no charge for the visit.

  ‘What have you let her do to you?’ the mother wanted to know. She stood majestically; authority is more awesome on four legs, and she had all the grandeur of one of nature’s most experienced victims.

  ‘Nothing. I don’t understand.’

  ‘You know what these devices are the doctors like this Doctor Fleming put in girls?’ She explained that they were contraceptive, contrary to Thou shalt not kill; that Dr Fleming had done this only because she presumed Barbara would be having evil relations with men and wanted to be sure that a child would not result.

  ‘I see,’ Barbara said. It was all information. ‘I think it’s gone now, in any case.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the mother, ‘so much for busy-body Dr Fleming.’

  You won’t stop me liking her though, Barbara inwardly announced.

  The mother’s hand took Barbara by the shoulder. ‘Fix me up, dear. And we’ll have a little talk.’

  During the milking she spoke over her shoulder to her daughter; it was not, at first sight, an arrangement that allowed Mrs Glover to speak with broad, easy wisdom. By now, though, no Glover saw any absurdity in the twice-daily burlesque of her lactation. Barbara terrified of imminent frankness, bent concentratedly above the pail.

  ‘You see, I’m a Catholic wife and (I’m not trying to shock you but you’re getting old now) I could make use of the sort of…services Dr Fleming offers—if they weren’t filthy in God’s eyes.’ She sniffed; faulty antrims made all the Glovers virtuosos of nasal wisdom and sadness.

  ‘I think you can understand,’ she continued, ‘that I just cannot risk falling pregnant. But a person has to be a good wife too, and all the priests tell you it’s mortally sinful for a wife to go on refusing and refusing.’ She shook her head. ‘Men are so different.’

  Barbara felt the muscles at the back of her throat clenching in readiness for retching.

  ‘There are good Catholic methods,’ the mother continued, ‘to avoid having children—not that I didn’t praise God for you and Damian, you mustn’t think otherwise. But these methods…they’re too hard to work out for a simple woman like me.’

  She groaned. Barbara concentrated on the libations of good milk falling into the bucket.

  The mother said, ‘But one thing’s certain, that Dr Fleming has befouled you without you knowing. Barbara, you must be very watchful…’

  Your room seemed not to have been touched since the past August by anything more than a light duster. Your holiday reading sat pat and gaudy on two small bookshelves made of brick and planking; and the bed was made on the clean, chaste lines of a bed in a hospital run by nuns.

  All this you took account of in passing, for having come straight from fondling Barbara’s hair, you wanted to conjure fantastic possibilities by going straight to your cupboard, where you found the white overalls and gumboots, the uniform of the mineral company that mined the beach to the south of Campbell’s Reach. The overalls had been thrown down, compactly folded, so that you wondered whether Barbara had laundered them as a penance, or left them alone (either from respect for your privacy, or terror of these visible implements of her loss of virginity) to settle in the folds in which you had left them.

  You lent your head against a plywood shelf and let its edge bite your forehead; a distraction from the toppling melancholy of your non-possession of her.

  The overalls dated from a Friday in the previous May. Barbara had gone to town to shop. You had gone with her, because you had agreed to meet an old schoolfriend for mid-afternoon beer. A cadet journalist on the town triweekly (which was owned by his father), the friend seemed instilled with the town’s diverse life and conflicts. So that he could glance around the bar and see not simply individual men approaching more or less the human pattern but dramatic monoliths, dedicated to levees rather than dredging, to a sullage works across the river rather than to one this side. After an hour of this matching of municipal faces with their histories, you had become depressively impatient at being an alien. Your friend then had to go back to work.

  You stayed on at the bar, fondling your near-empty glass in a hotel and a town which your friend had managed to estrange you from even further. Near you, a man of your own size though more taut, and with black hair that might have been Glover, called to the barmaid.

  ‘Listen, packet of Players, love!’

  The woman narrowed her eyes above the three beer glasses she was filling from a chromium beer-gun.

  ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’

  The customer, who might have been Barbara’s age, slowly disposed his big frame in a stance of apology.

  The barmaid said, ‘An I’ll have less of this love business. It’s Mrs Placer thanks!’

  The mineral man emphatically forwent battle with a gesture of both hands and said he was sorry. When she had gone up the bar to the cash register he asked you did you think she thought that he had designs on her.

  ‘She might.’

  ‘Gord! Pity poor Mr Placer.’ He whistled as comment on her extreme unloveliness. ‘Hey, wait there, how’m I bloody-well supposed to know she’s Mrs Placer?’

  ‘I don’t know. She seems to think you ought to.’

  ‘There was a young lady called Placer, got hit in the arse by some tracer.’

  The lady called Placer had returned to the beer-taps, where your overalled near-double swayed a little, hugging his just cause to himself.

  ‘Hey, Mrs Placer, love. How’m I damn-well supposed to know your name’s Mrs Placer?’

  ‘Shut up!’ She pretended to be intent on the collars of the beer she was pouring. ‘Just shut up!’

  ‘Listen, ask me cousin here.’ He clutched your elbow. ‘Do you think I ought to know the name of every barmaid in the bloody state?’

  Shrugging, you saw the woman’s face as if for the first time, the harried live liquid of her eyes set in features that it took forty semi-tropic summers and much maltreatment to make, and all that set satirically (a person would think) over the hotel uniform, the coy frilled front of her white blouse. She was frightened and pitiably ugly, you had time to see. You suggested to the Mineral Deposits man that he might forget the business.

  ‘Yes, please,’ the barmaid said through clenched teeth.

  But the Mineral Deposits man had gone spaciously logical. ‘Say “Yes, please, Frederic”, if we’re going to be so damned fussy about names.’

  ‘Andy!’ the barmaid shrieked. This last reaction had the effect on you of the splicing of the crisis of one bad film onto the doldrums of another.

  Andy, you saw, was a giant who had materialized at Frederic’s right side. He had hold of Frederic’s elbow in a way that made him look like a formal mourner at a funeral. He waited an apparently solicitous second before bringing his fist up at great speed and into Frederic’s face. Frederic fell back on your elbow and then sat on the floor.

  ‘You too,’ said Andy, nodding at you. The resemblance had not evaded him.

  His hypnotic fist made for your eyes with the momentum of something hurled. It seemed to you, though, that you had plentiful time to duck or dodge it: yet it had an aura that kept you still. By force of will you brought your jaw to make a left turn. The neck, under your right ear, took the blow; and that was bad enough. You told yourself that now you were entitled to fall flat with honour, yet found yourself still foolishly standing. Up the yellow tunnel of your vision came that fist once more.

  What you next knew was that you were sitting on the floor feeling reluctantly new-born and bilious. A large head-high argument raged between Mrs Placer, jealous Andy, and Mr Noonan, who owned The Caledonian.

  ‘No,’ Mr Noonan was saying, ‘if he goes on like this every time you serve a customer, you’ll just have to find a job in a frock salon or somethink.’

  Later, Noonan had Frederic and yourself carried to the spare room behind the kitchen, where two old iron-frame beds under home-made cotton quilts awaited vagrants or casual labourers. You could both sleep the matter off till six. If you weren’t gone then, said Noonan, he would call in the police.

  The door closed, and Frederic was straightaway sick in a corner. You drowsed. When you woke it was to Frederic’s inquiry: ‘Are you asleep?’

  ‘I have been.’

  ‘Bloody funny. How was I to know the old whore’s name?’

  ‘As you said.’ You tried to stand, but the world gave you a sign of its future intentions by slipping from beneath your feet. Your mouth filled with bile.

  ‘Did you know there’s a very good whorehouse in Westcott Street?’ Frederic asked.

  ‘No. I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Since we’re on the subject of Mrs Placer, like, there is one.’

  ‘Good.’