The Mark II Jaguar, silver, red leather, flew across Moreland Road and straight through a red light. It was seven in the morning. I was driving blind into the rising sun. I saw nothing else, let alone a couple of peripheral red orbs. I should have been more attentive. I should have driven slower. I should have been dead. Plenty of crooks in swinging 1960s London used Mark II Jaguars as getaway cars, and crashed them, and ended up maimed or worse. I kept going. The maternity hospital was a faint brutalist silhouette in the distance.
Last day of January, 1977. I’d stayed awake the previous night with a Haig on ice and the late movie - Vertigo - on TV, waiting for the phone to ring. It was good. I had stared at the screen without wanting to throw a brick through it, and even the ads were kind of acceptable, corny but with none of the sanctimonious rationalisations that sell everything from cans of tuna to cars these days.
The television itself was a chunky four-legged mid-seventies model in fake walnut with coloured pixels in the screen. Its obscured mono speaker, behind a vertically-slotted plastic grate, issued a soothingly muffled sound, enhanced by the acoustic accidents of thick tufted carpet, flock wallpaper and tall-backed stuffed sofas, relics of 1970s taste. My voluminous armchair was of deep buttoned velvet, chartreuse, with an adjacent side table tall enough not to have to hyperextend my arm to reach the Haig. No wonder people fell asleep in front of the television. Today’s living rooms by contrast are echo chambers of wood, glass and metal, and you perch like a job applicant on a sofa that comes halfway up your back, with your drink on a coffee table two inches off the floor.
Vertigo ended with its spidery end-frame graphics. When the phone rang it was just before seven; I’d slept. It was Mr Suter himself, the obstetrician. In doctor honorific terms they seem to pass beyond Dr and turn back into a Mr. It’s a boy, he said, breech birth, about four in the morning, a bit complicated, so we didn’t call you. All well. He rang off. He sounded tired. I ran to the Jaguar, pulled the door shut, u-turned, and drove.
When I saw the child I had to lean on the maternity room window sill to stop the sudden faintness. He was tiny, red, in a kind of plastic tub. There were about ten of them behind the glass; but your own always look more vulnerable, especially the firstborn. You think they’ll suddenly forget how to breathe and die. I walked down the corridor to the ward, where his mother, wearing a purple-and-white nylon nightdress, was nonchalantly drinking tea.
I sat with her for a while, and then I drove the Jaguar home.
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