With No Crying Read Online Free PDF Page A

even a fortnight later, her period already six days overdue and her breasts tingling strangely, she still could not take in what was happening.
    It was not that she had failed to notice the symptoms, or was unaware of their significance: it was just that the whole thing was impossible to believe in, like a fairy story. That a hurried and graceless entangling of limbs and genitals, lasting a minute or less, should have consequences vast and incalculable, stretching on and on into the unimaginable future—it was beyond all comprehending. As a result of that single inconsequential minute, a new and perfectly-formed living creature was destined to walk the earth, to breathe the air, to feel the heat of the sun, for seventy or eighty years… Easier, far, to believe that the Doctor would bring the baby in his black bag, that a stork would swoop down with it out of the bright air.
    Yet truth it was. It was a scientific fact. Those passing moments of embarrassment and disillusion had been sublime moments of creation. The imagination could not register so incongruous a causal sequence, nor belief encompass it.
    But as the days went by—seven … eight … nine, and still her period hadn’t come, belief began almost imperceptibly to establish itself in her consciousness. It came not suddenly, in aflash of revelation, but in a slow, unstoppable tide of growing wonder, of half-incredulous joy.
    A baby! I’m having a baby !I, Miranda Field, schoolgirl, have been vouchsafed this miracle of new life growing inside me! I’m pregnant! Me! It’s happening to me !
    There had been occasions, in the long-ago time before all this had happened, when she and Sharon had indulged in fantasies of Virgin Births, and man-less pregnancies. They had discussed, with much giggling and yet half-credulously, the likelihood or otherwise of being impregnated while they slept by the Holy Ghost: what it would feel like? and whether they’d still remember it in the morning…?
    An immaculate conception! Strange how childish fantasies can so truly foreshadow the realities to come! For this was exactly what it felt like—as if the glory that had come upon her had its origin in some sacred source beyond human understanding, far, far removed from Trevor with his heavy gasping and his offhand, uneasy haste…
    It was real !It was happening! To her !Lying here on her rumpled bed, in her familiar childhood bedroom, the miracle was already beginning. Inside her, right now, as she lay here, a little creature no bigger than a frog was forming limbs for itself, and eyes, and the beginnings of a brain; a brain which would one day contain a vocabulary of forty or fifty thousand words, as well as geometry, and algebra, and the names and addresses of countless friends and acquaintances yet unborn. At this very moment, only an inch or two below her knicker elastic, those first clusters of cells were gathering in readiness to read Shakespeare, to listen to Beethoven and Elvis Presley, to learn “On Westminster Bridge” by heart; to gaze through a telescope at the moons of Jupiter, to read about Black Holes, and wonder about the infinite spaces beyond the furthest galaxies…
    *
    “Darling…! I’m so sorry I upset you, I didn’t mean…”
    But it was she, Miranda, who should be apologising, not Mummy! It wasn’t fair !Mummy always managed to get the better of you, somehow! Swivelling round onto her stomach,Miranda buried her face in the pillow, and lay there, mute and ashamed, waiting for it all to be over.
    And yet still Mummy kept hovering there between the bed and the door, baffled and uncondemning, poised as on a tightrope between staying and going, and babbling uneasily on and on about misunderstandings, and about it being nearly dinner-time, and about not worrying Daddy just now, with the by-election coming on, and about nobody blaming anybody for anything, and was Miranda not feeling well, would she like some nice hot soup on a tray, in bed…?
    If Mrs Field