Life (43 page)

The first days of that September felt like the last of the wine. The parents struggled to accept their loss, but Jake had started school, and he was vanishing from them. The little boy who had been all their treasure was gone, never to return; and it was cruelly hard. At the end of the month the three of them went to a party held by one of Anna’s colleagues. It was the usual thing: a thirties semi-detached, a pleasant room with glass doors open onto the patio and the garden. Complacently dated music; children under foot; twenty or so adults eating Soil Association Certified barbecue from paper plates and drinking wine from plastic cups. Alice, the woman who was holding the party, introduced Spence, for some reason he didn’t quite catch, to a younger woman in a big dark blue shirt and a narrow white ankle-length skirt. She had red-gold hair, combed smoothly to her shoulders but cut short around her face, reminding him somehow of a Japanese woodcut.

“So, hi, Mer. Is that right, Mer?”

She nodded.

“Is that short for anything?”

“Meret.”

“Huh?” She’d been introduced as an artist, whatever that meant. “Oh, I wonder if that is after the fur teacup guy. Meret Oppenheim.”

“Yes, that’s me. Eccentric artist parents. But she wasn’t a guy, she was a woman.”

He felt put in the wrong. She was pretty, but he was looking for an exit.

“I’m so glad to meet you. I really admire your writing.”

This was a first.
They all
knew about Spence’s literary ventures and were politely uninterested. As far as anyone else was concerned he was Anna’s househusband. He warmed to this girl (she didn’t look more than eighteen). “You’ve read something of mine? Really? Of your own free will? Did you find it online? My God, may I touch you?”

She laughed. “I meant Shere Khan. Of course I’ve read it. I think it’s terrific.”

The penny dropped. “Oh, you’re Meret
Hazelwood.”

Spence had been insulted when Fiona the agent suggested he try writing for children, but it had been no effort to rattle off one of the Shere Khan adventures (Jake hanging over his shoulder, first and best critic). The publishers had liked it, in fact they’d liked it so well he’d already turned in the second installment. They had matched him with an illustrator, he’d known she lived somewhere close, but he hadn’t wanted to meet her. So this was she, and thank God he hadn’t said anything rude about her pictures.

“But, um, I thought Alice said a different name,” he bleated, embarrassed, because he really should have known, and because he hadn’t caught the other name, either.

“I’m really Meret Craft. That’s my married name.” Spence was the one caught out, but the girl was blushing: she raised her chin with a brave air of defying her traitor complexion. “But I have read ‘Kes’f.’ I’d read it before.”

“Huh, oh you mean
Sef.
”

“Weird name,”

“It’s a password I don’t use anymore. Look…can I get you another drink?”

She smiled at him shyly, lips closed. He went to the kitchen to fill their plastic cups with
côte de decaying nuclear power station,
feeling oddly shaken. So he had a colleague, a colleague of his own, first time since he left Emerald City, how exciting. He thought of Madame Bovary,
J’ai un amant, un amant…!
In the door to the garden a tall lean guy in green linen trousers and a white Nehru jacket was standing, turned half-profile, his dark hair cut
en brosse,
beard shadow on his jaw, something familiar about him. Spence took the cups back.

“So was K… I mean Sef, was it true?” asked Meret, smiling more eagerly, showing small white teeth.

“Ah—”

“Is that a very naive thing to ask?”

“Well, it was when I was fifteen, sixteen. I made the boy in the book thirteen because I thought that was sexier: more pubertal. It’s true that I learned to fence, one summer, and had some of those things happen—”

“To be different, because you hated ball games. And the tramp in the woods, who lived under an old hospital bed, and kept the castors oiled so he could sail away on it—”

“If the white-coats came after, yeah, he was real.”

She laughed. “I think you’re telling me what I want to hear. Did you keep up the fencing?”

“Nah. It was
way
cool, but my D’Artagnan fantasy was short-lived, kind of faded after the duel and all… Don’t you think,” he added, fearing he sounded like an ageing hippie to this child, “that the word ‘cool’ has become the new ‘nice’? Everyone uses it, and thinks they shouldn’t ought to.”

“Pedants think it should only be applied in its proper original sense.”

“Like that guy in
Northanger Abbey,
fighting against the tide.”

“Oh yes. But what is the proper original sense of ‘cool’?”

As if he would know. Spence cleared his throat. “I’ve heard it’s a Yoruba term, translated into English, originally meaning something quite serious: a state of inner balance, poise, and right measure.” He had a feeling he ought to cut this short and go find Anna. He compromised by hooking Jake out of a passing storm of midgets and introducing him to the lady who had drawn Shere Khan so splendidly. Jake preferred his own portraits of the gallant captain and her crew. He sidled, and wouldn’t stay.

“I’ve seen you with Jake before,” confessed Meret. “And his mother, if that’s who it is taking him to school when you don’t. My two oldest go to the same school. Florrie is in the other kindergarten class; it’s her first term as well. My oldest, Tomkin, is in Year Two. Jake is such a beautiful little boy… Er, he’s adopted?”

“No,” said Spence, grinning. “It’s me. I have, or had, a black granddaddy.”

She blushed like a rose.

The tall guy in the green trousers had come over and stood by her side.

“Spence? It
is
Spence, isn’t it?”

The half-recognized profile and the name slotted together. Craft. Oh, fuck… It was
Charles Craft:
thin and prosperous and much improved. They discovered that they were practically neighbors. Charles had his own Gene-Mod nursery company, called
Natural Craft.
Meret, like Spence, worked at home. What a coincidence! Anna and Spence must come to supper; they must fix a date. Charles was keen, Meret was keen. Anna, when she was tracked down and presented with this coincidence accompli, went into Anna-reticent mode, but was obliged to be reticently keen.

Anna had known that Charles Craft was still in Bournemouth. He had been born around here; he had a right. She’d known about
Natural Craft,
the family business regenerated. When she had spotted him picking up his wife and two red-headed children outside Jake’s school, she’d felt doomed. She’d been praying ever since that she would never be spotted herself. But if his wife was Spence’s illustrator, she would have to accept her fate.

They had to hire a babysitter for the supper date, an unusual extravagance.

“And I must say,” grumbled Anna, “It is galling to think we are paying good money to spend an evening with
Charles Craft!”

Spence raised his eyebrows. “I thought you and he used to be kinda close, at one time.”

“Don’t you believe it. Enforced team-mates, was all.”

“I never liked him much myself, back then. But he’s probably changed.”

“Have you changed?”

Spence looked into the mirror opposite their bed. Spence looked out. His hair was longer than when he’d been an undergraduate, shorter than when he’d worn dreads. His bones were more visible; his skin was still inclined to break out. He rubbed a little concealer into the oily pores around his nose, touched up his eyebrows lightly: “No.”

“Well, there you are. People don’t.”

“Okay, possibly he’s a bit of a shit, but we have to have some kind of social life. You can’t restrict yourself to only knowing the few people you totally like and trust, Anna.”

“I don’t see why not,” said Anna Anaconda.

The Crafts lived with Meret’s parents, a filial and ecologically sound arrangement that had to command respect. The big, double-fronted house, which was called The Rectory, was full of paintings by Meret’s father, nudes and gaudy landscapes in a sugary, photo-realist style that had been fashionable in the sixties. Godfrey was very old, a craggy shambling wreck. Meret’s mother, Isobel, was much younger, and didn’t seem to be the woman featured in the pictures; perhaps that was a previous wife. She had a rather unnerving manner: a wandering glance and a constant, affectless smile. The other guests were Alice and Ken Oguma from the university, a tv journalist called Noelle Seger with her partner, and a something-in-the-city with his graphic-designer wife. Everyone looked sleek and smart, and it was indefinably clear that no one knew the Crafts particularly well. This was reassuring for Anna. A formal dinner party, a collection of near-strangers gathered together to impress each other, was something Spence detested.

She felt worse when she found herself placed next to Charles.

“Well, Anna,” he said, at once. “I never thought you’d have gone in for babypharming. I’d have thought you would have disapproved. I’ve been following your career with interest, as they say. You’ve been getting famous, while I’ve been plugging away at improving the vegetables.” He glanced at her, slyly. “When did you get your eyes fixed?”

“My eyes? Oh, that. I had it done in China, ages ago.”

“China,
eh? Been there, done that… What kind of job do they do in China? I guess you’re looking at about five-ten years, before you need them fixed again. That’s the trouble with cosmetic surgery, once you’ve started you can’t stop.”

“The operation I had is supposed to be permanent.”

“Well good luck… I read your paper, the Geneva one that caught so much flak. Very accomplished, considering where you were working. It must have been a blow when Parentis crashed.”

“Not really.”

“They backed the wrong horse,” Mr Something-in-the-City, who had been introduced as Darth, chimed in knowledgeably. “Priced themselves out of the market.”

“Invested too heavily in their way-out pure researchers,” Charles grinned at Anna.

“What happened to Parentis, really?” asked Noelle Seger, leaning across the table. “Please tell me, I’m genuinely interested. They were among the hot pioneers, doing amazing things, and then… It must have been so exciting, working for them.”

“What, unmh Darth, said, more or less.” Anna smiled at Mr Something, wondering if that was scifi-fan parents or something ethnic from Uzbekistan. “They backed the wrong horse. There were two ways to go in human assisted reproduction. You optimized, or you selected. Parentis went for optimization, which is classier and preserves, well, all kinds of things. Selection, where you screen a portfolio of cloned embryonic cell masses, pick the obvious winner, and dump the rest, is far cheaper. When HAR became mass market, relatively anyway, there was a price war, and firms like Parentis were in trouble. But they haven’t disappeared. They’ve just become very much smaller, and very, very expensive.”

“Selection is not only cheaper,” said Darth, “it’s more natural, isn’t it?”