“How far gone are you?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. Almost twenty weeks, I think.”

“Oh, God Jesus! You’re halfway there!”

“Nothing shifted it, nothing!”

“You don’t want it, obviously.”

Pappy began to shiver, then the shivering turned to shaking. “Yes, yes, I want it! But how can I have it, tell me that? Ezra can’t help me, he’s already got seven children! His wife refuses to give him a divorce, even though she knows all about me. How can I possibly tell him?”

“It takes two to make a baby, Pappy. You have to tell him! No matter how many children he already has, he’s got to answer for this one too, it’s his responsibility.” I gave her more coffee laced with brandy. “Why have you kept this to yourself for so long? Surely you knew that we’d all stick by you.”

“I—just—couldn’t get the words out, even to Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz,” she whispered, mopping the tears. “I must have skipped two periods before I even began to suspect. Then I counted, but I must have been too far gone already for things like the ergotamine to work. Oh, Harriet, what am I going to do?” came that cry.

“First off, you’re going to phone Ezra at the University and tell him that you have to see him here today. After he knows, we’ll take it as it comes,” I said, more optimistically than I felt.

When she refused, I marched to the phone in my bedroom which Duncan insisted I have installed, called Sister Agatha and told her that Pappy was so ill neither of us would be in to work, then I located Ezra and ordered him to report in one hour. Had it been Pappy, he might have argued, but listening to my strange voice and the iron in it, he said he’d come.

Pappy fell asleep while I tried to read a book, my mind too busy to make sense of a single word. The Pill represents true emancipation of the female, I thought. Which is why, now that it’s with us in all its awesome fact, it’s so decried, so impossible to get. It’s in the hands of mostly men. Some religious bodies call it evil, and those hypocritical bastards of politicians have fled screaming. But men won’t be able to control its distribution much longer. The Pill is going to belt the balls to the women’s end of the court. The Pill is Power.

I did understand, however, that Ezra isn’t one of The Pill’s opponents. As Pappy works in a hospital, he probably assumed that she had access to it. He’s not a health worker, how would he know how hospitals operate? But he should have asked her. Maybe he had. She’d told me once that she always used a diaphragm. But the pair of them spent each weekend they were together expanding their emotions with hashish and cocaine. Probably they hadn’t been as careful as they thought during a session of ordinary intercourse. Oh, Pappy, you should have stuck to fellatio!

I let her sleep for half an hour, then roused her and told her to have a shower, get ready for Ezra.

“I’m all swollen from crying,” she objected.

“The sleep dealt with that, now you have to deal with Ezra,” I said, adamant.

“I’m sorry I didn’t confide in you, Harriet, but the words kept getting stuck in my throat. I couldn’t get them out. And I kept telling myself, if I don’t say a word to anyone, it will go away—if I wait a little longer, it won’t exist. Isn’t that strange? You’d think that anything so unwanted would vanish from sheer despair. But not it. Not it.”

“Then you definitely don’t want to go on with the pregnancy,” I said, helping her down the passage.

“I wish I could! Oh, how much I wish I could!” she cried. “I want it because I love him so much, and this is his child. I want it because I’d like to have a child to live for. But it’s utterly impossible. How would I support myself? They don’t give unmarried mothers anything, Harriet, you know that.”

“I believe there is a tiny subsistence payment, but it’s far too small to make ends meet without working. What about having it and giving it up for adoption?”

“No, no, no! I’d rather kill it in embryo than give it away! To have it grow up thinking its natural mother didn’t want it? I would go through the whole thing like a starving baker shaping a loaf of bread for someone else to eat. No, an abortion is the only way out.” Her eyes filled again. “Oh, Harriet, it’s so hopeless! I’ll never be the same again. But what else can I do?”

“Ezra will help,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel.

“He hasn’t the money to help,” she said.

“Rubbish! He has a house big enough for a wife and seven kids, a flat in Glebe, and the income to buy illegal drugs,” I said. “Now get ready, Pappy, Ezra will be here in twenty-five minutes.”

He didn’t stay long. I heard the front door slam, and sat waiting for Pappy. When she hadn’t come ten minutes later, I went to her.

“He’s gone!” she said in tones of wonder.

“Gone for good?”

“Oh, yes, definitely for good. He can’t help me, Harriet, he just doesn’t have the money.”

“He had the money to get you into this mess,” I said tartly. The bastard! If he’d been anywhere within catching distance, I would have taken a nice sharp scalpel to his scrotum. The world-famous philosopher would have to change his career to singing in the Vienna Boys Choir.

Then the battle really began, and I lost it. Why do people’s feelings rule them to the exclusion of the smallest particle of commonsense? Pappy wants this baby, but she won’t hear of taking her precious Ezra to court, or even going to his wife and asking her to help. No, no, no, Ezra mustn’t suffer! Ezra’s career and position must be preserved at all and any cost! She kept talking about abortion being the only answer, kept saying the child was cursed because its father didn’t want it, kept insisting that she wouldn’t bring a child into the world whose father didn’t want it. And on, and on, and on. Finally she asked if she might borrow the cost of an abortion from me. Apparently she’d been helping dear Ezra buy those expensive illegal drugs, so she was skint.

Eventually I left her and went upstairs to see Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, who had to be told. This time I was the one broke down, cried and cried while Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz fussed and clucked with the brandy.

“But don’t you dare say it was in the cards!” I yelled when I could speak again. “If it was, you should have done something!”

“Bullshit, princess,” she said. “You can’t run other people’s lives for them, and if they don’t ask what’s in the cards, you can’t go runnin’ off to tell them. The cards don’t work that way. Or the Glass, or Progressions.”

“For one thing, she’s almost twenty weeks,” I said, calming down. “For another, I know she wants this baby desperately, no matter how much she talks about abortion. Couldn’t we all chip in a bit each and help her keep the baby?”

“No, we can’t,” said the woman I had always thought so kind, so generous, so forgiving. “Think, Harriet Purcell, think! Yeah, we could do that for a while, but Toby’s movin’ out soon, Jim an’ Bob ain’t gunna want to divert what spare cash they got from women’s causes to Pappy and a baby, and what about you, eh? What happens if you decide on a life in the suburbs after all, and trot off too? You reckon I’ll be here to take the responsibility?”

She got up and walked around the table to stand over me and pin me on those terrible eyes. “D’youse really think I don’t know there’s somethin’ wrong with me?” she demanded. “I got a tumour in me brain, and it’s let me live an awful lot longer than anyone thought it would. I might live an awful lot longer still, but there’s no guarantee. I saw the great Gilbert Phillips himself, an’ he said I got a tumour in me brain. He never made mistakes—if he said you got a brain tumour, you got a brain tumour. It ain’t malignant, but it’s there, an’ I suppose it grows a bit from time to time. Some fuckin’ Vinnie’s doctor put me on a newfangled hormone nearly five years ago, and bang! I had Flo. So I stopped takin’ the stuff. All I do is get on with livin’. That’s what we all gotta do. So you leave Pappy alone to make up her own mind, hear me, princess?”