Mendel's Dwarf (44 page)

“They can’t focus when they’re newborn,” he retorted. “He can’t see a thing.”

“But he
looks
as though he’s looking.”

“May I hold him?” I asked.

I saw the nurse glance at Hugo for approval. “Doctor Lambert’s the godfather,” he said, as though the status of godfather conferred some kind of right by proxy. Smiling, the nurse bent down toward me, and for a moment the scrap of flesh writhed in my arms. I felt what? I must confess that I felt something remarkable. But what, exactly? Well, I felt like my father. Is that absurd? Perhaps. Bathetic, certainly. Sergeant Eric Lambert, Royal Engineers; Mr. Lambert, ineffectual teacher of physics; Eric, inadequate father and passer-on of genes, the man who had never looked me straight in the eye. I felt like him. There was nothing cerebral or contrived about the feeling; it was vivid, even visceral—genetic perhaps, if there is something mystical in the machinations of the genome. I felt like my father. More than that, more than mere illusion, pathetic fallacy, whatever you wish to call it, for a moment I
was
my father. I was the man I had always longed to be. I was tall.

“Little mouse,” I told my son; and he did look like a mouse pup, one of those pink and naked things that we rear in the laboratory.

I left shortly after that. There wasn’t much to stay for, really. Doctors appeared, with the exclusive air of the priesthood about them. They showed a faint impatience with Hugo’s presence and no desire to have me around. One of them, the consultant, began to tell the others about the case, pontificating like a barrister before a docile jury.

“She’ll wake up,” a nurse assured me as I went out. “I know she will. It’s just a matter of time. We keep talking to her, keep
giving her baby Adam to cuddle, and she’ll wake up. The human brain is a wonderful thing.”

Don’t worry. I’m not going to lose my grip on things. Benedict Lambert is not going to embarrass you. He is going to remain calm and remote from the muddy universe of the emotions. He is going to describe the facts, the remote horrors of modern medicine, the infusions of radioactive tracers, the brain scans, the electroencephalograms, the intravenous drips, the tubes and the needles; and he is going to remain remote from it all. The doctors talked of amniotic fluid embolism, of lesions in Jean’s brain, damage in the hippocampus, the pasture where the mind grazes among scents and smells; and meanwhile Jean lay inert and unresponsive, a mere construct of metabolizing cells, her DNA being transcribed into RNA, the RNA being translated into protein, the proteins working in their intricate and ineffable manner, and nothing happening. Nothing that was Jean.

Hugo came to see me at my flat a few days later. He didn’t warn me of his visit. There was just a shadow coming down the steps outside the front window and a ring on the bell, and there he was when I opened the front door, a grim, stolid figure like an undertaker’s mute looming over the open grave. My heart lurched—no dwarf organ, but a full-sized thing pulsing just below my sternum, making my chest throb with the effort. “She’s all right, isn’t she?” I cried.

“Jean?”

“Of course.”

He nodded, as though agreeing to the obvious. “Well, she’s just the same. They call it stable, but that doesn’t really mean
anything, does it? The dead are stable, aren’t they? The fact is, they don’t know what they’re doing. Look, can I come in for a moment? I was just passing by and I thought …”

I stood aside for him. Of course he couldn’t have just been “passing by.” You couldn’t have just passed by my flat on the way to anywhere. He had come with intention and deliberation. I settled him down, made him a cup of coffee, that kind of thing. “You’re a friend, Ben,” he said, as though seeking assurance of the fact. “I need your help.”

“So tell me.”

“They’re talking about it being permanent. The damage to her brain, I mean. Even if she does wake up, she’s not going to be the same …” He perched on the edge of a chair, like a man sitting on the edge of a cliff and trying to summon up the courage to jump.

“You’ve got to keep hoping …” I said, but the sentence trailed away lamely. Have you got to keep hoping? It has always seemed a dubious proposition to me. Anyway, Hugo Miller ignored my exhortation.

“That’s not what I came to see you about,” he said. He glanced around almost furtively, as though there might be a dozen listeners hiding in the corners of my sitting room. Then he leaned forward confidingly. “I don’t know how to put this, Ben. Perhaps I shouldn’t be talking about it at all, seeing the state Jean is in, but I’ve thought about it a lot recently …”

“Thought about what?”

“The baby.”

“What about the baby? The baby is fine. It’s Jean who’s not well.”

“That’s not the point …” He picked at his fingernails and bit his lip and glanced around again. Then, finding no eavesdroppers, he breathed in sharply, looked directly at me, and said, “You see, the baby’s not mine.”

I laughed. Oh, a merry little laugh. “Not yours? How can that be?”

He seemed emboldened by confession. “I’ve done my homework, Ben. I know about all this Mendel stuff. And I know that I’ve got blue eyes and Jean’s got blue eyes—well, one of them’s green, but you explained about that, didn’t you?—and the baby’s got brown eyes. That’s just not possible. Is it?”

“Oh, but—”

“It’s unusual for a baby that young to have brown eyes, isn’t it? But it has. And they can’t have come from me.”

“These things are never certain …”

He looked straight into my brown eyes, and his own blue ones were perplexed, as though they were looking at something obvious but difficult to see—like one of those optical illusions where, once you know the trick, you can resolve a drawing of an old man’s face into a picture of a mother and child. “She’s been unfaithful to me in the past, I know she has. She confessed it. And now I think she got together with that doctor and used someone else’s sperm. And they didn’t tell me. That mine was no good, I mean, not even for that
in vitro
business. That’s where you come in.”

I looked around for a means of escape. “Me?”

“You can tell me. It’s my right to know, for God’s sake! You can clear the whole thing up. All I want is one of those DNA tests done—fingerprints or whatever it is you fellows call them …”

“A DNA test?”

“On the baby and on me. Ben, you must help me. I want you to find out if the baby really is mine …”

“And if it’s not?”

“I don’t want it. If it’s not mine, then I don’t want it.”

There is a story. It comes from Holland. It has something of the status of an urban myth, yet all the elegant simplicity of truth. A Dutch woman undergoing
in vitro
fertilization treatment joyously became pregnant. It duly transpired that she was carrying
twins, and of course both Mummy and Daddy were delighted. The wonders of science and all that. Together they watched the little creatures on the ultrasound screen, heard the twin hearts, thrilled to the twin movements. And when the babies were duly born (one hopes—oh, how one hopes!—that the father was present at the happy event), one of the emergent babies was white-skinned and blond-haired and blue-eyed, just like Mummy and Daddy … while the other was black. It transpired that during the
in vitro
fertilization process, there had been contamination with sperm from a previous hopeful father …

Science as practical joke. Maybe that’s all we’re worth. Slapstick comedy. The conjuring trick gone hilariously wrong, the conjurer triumphantly pulling from the hat not a docile white pigeon but a black and raucous crow.

I looked at Hugo Miller sitting there in front of me, replete with bigotry. “You don’t need any tests,” I told him. “You don’t need any tests because I can tell you the answer here and now. The child is nothing to do with you, Hugo. Nothing whatsoever.” I savored the moment, relished the expression on his face, the stupid
of surprise. “
I
am the father. Ridiculous Ben Lambert is the father. Adam is ours—Jean’s and mine. Nothing to do with you at all. Do you understand that? He is nothing to do with you. I was her lover and you were too damned prejudiced to realize it.”

There was a long pause. Outside sounds came down to us—an ambulance siren wailing in despair, a motorbike blaring past, footsteps clip-clopping along the pavement. Someone shouted at someone else: “Fuck
off
, will yer?”

“I see,” said Hugo, quite softly. He rose from my chair. There was even an ironic smile somewhere up there among the freckles and the taut nerves. “I see.” He stood on his solemn dignity in front of me and (a strange, old-fashioned gesture) half-bowed to
me as though to the dwarf king on his throne. “I suppose it’s only what I guessed,” he said. “Deep down.”

There is an absurdity about the cuckold, isn’t there? Always was, always will be. Cuckold Syndrome. The ten percent of all happy and oblivious and, above all, faithful husbands who are not, in fact, the fathers of their sons and daughters. Something both absurd and touching. There is even a trite little evolutionary argument to explain their existence, that women choose them as husbands for reliability and protection, while seeking out some strapping, youthful genes to unite with their own and thus make genetically fit babies: the mother bird inviting the cuckoo to come into her warm little nest.