Mendel's Dwarf (28 page)

Well, of course. What would you have done?

The technicalities were easy: Certificate A of the 1967 Act (
not to be destroyed within three years of the date of operation
) to be completed by two medical doctors—

We hereby certify that we are of the opinion, formed in good faith, that—(ring clause number four)—
there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped
.

—and a booking made at a convenient clinic. They were very caring people at the clinic, full of gentle explanations couched in reassuring terms. One of the counselors took me into her office. It was a homely place with positive pictures on the wall: Van Gogh’s sunflowers, a Bonnard of a half-naked girl washing herself at a zinc tub, a Monet of a boating party on the Seine. Did those ethereal girls in silk chiffon get pregnant, I wondered? It seemed unlikely. The fat-bottomed girl at the tub was quite another thing: she probably already was, and by someone else’s husband.

“Are you a friend of Jean’s?” the counselor asked. Her phenotype was difficult to ascertain: hair dyed pale silver, eyebrows meticulously plucked, irises glinting behind tinted contact lenses, skin burnished by UV light, body strapped and girded and padded.

“I’m the father. Not of Jean Piercey,” I added with a smile. “Of her child.”

Barely a flicker across the featureless
maquillage
. “I see.”

“I’m sure you do. That makes it pretty incontrovertible, doesn’t it? The argument for abortion, I mean. No adequate prenatal
test. Fifty-fifty chance of ending up like me. Who’d bet a lifetime on the toss of a coin?”

She gave an abstract smile, abstract in the sense that it signified neither amusement nor sympathy, nor anything else that might normally be subsumed under the signifier
smile
. “Termination,” she corrected me. “Not abortion. And once the medical decisions have been made, the reasons are not our concern.”

“I’m sure not. But I expect they’d have agreed if there was a one-percent chance of a cleft palate, so who can complain?”

“Jean is the one we need to care for now,” she said.

“Of course. We’re hardly caring for the child, are we?”

“The conceptus,” she said. “A child is quite another thing.”

“It certainly is. Do you know what my job is?”

“Is that of any importance, sir? We came here to talk about Jean. But if you only wish to talk about yourself …”

“I’m a geneticist,” I said. “I work on DNA probes to try to identify genetic disorders. So far I’ve failed to find one that will enable my own condition to be identified, and as a result of that failure I’m conniving at the destruction of my own child.”

Her tone never wavered. “Would you like to speak to another of our counselors, sir? We have Mr. Morgan available at the moment.”

“I’m talking to you.”

That glacial smile. She looked over my head as though searching for a more interesting interlocutor at a cocktail party. “I’m about to be busy,” she said.

“Go,” I told her. “Please be busy somewhere else.”

I went in search of Jean. She was already installed in her room, her few possessions laid out on her bed—washing things, nightdress, a change of underwear. She stared out the window at the backyard of the building. The Post Office Tower loomed over the roofs, like a totem, like a phallus: not exactly the kind of thing one wanted in the landscape just there. “I’ll be all right,” she said. “There’s no need to wait. I’ll see you afterwards.”

We had already decided about afterwards. Afterwards she would go home to her aunt for a week. She needed to get away and sort herself out. What hold did I have over her? She’d
get
in touch once she had sorted things out. She was sorry. Terribly, terribly sorry. Being sorry was habitual with her.

So I left her in the clinic, and so in due course they came and took her away to the operating theater and anesthetized her and laid her on a slab. Her legs, those vulnerable, childlike legs, were splayed out and draped in sheets while a surgeon probed with instruments of stainless steel. And then the small thing within her, a thing mere millimeters long but already quite a good likeness of a human being, a thing of dubious genetic makeup that would have had problems making its way in the world whichever way the coin came down, was sucked into the void.

Mendel’s work came to the attention of the world only in 1900, sixteen years after his death. By 1905 the
Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene
(the Society for Racial Hygiene) was founded in Germany, followed by the Eugenics Education Society in Britain (1907),
¹
and the American Eugenics Society in the United States (1923). In the face of a genetic deterioration that they saw everywhere about them, these organizations pushed long and hard for the adoption of legislation that would preserve the genetic fitness of the population. “How long are we Americans to be so careful for the pedigree of our pigs and chicken and cattle—and then leave the ancestry of our children to chance or to blind sentiment?”
²
they asked.

The leading exponent of British eugenics was Sir Ronald
Fisher; the prime mover in the United States was the Yale economist Irving Fisher; the first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics in Germany was Eugen Fischer.

You’d better be careful if your name is Fisher.

Things change, people change, the mutability of circumstance is what impresses. Two days after the operation I collected Jean from the clinic and found her changed. Where before she had always stumbled into any silence with ill-considered words, now there was a willingness to leave a silence alone. “Yes, I’m all right,” was all she said. “No, there’s no pain. They told me there might be some bleeding, like with a period. That’s all.”

Miss Piercey, in her gray wool dress, clutching her little suitcase, clipping down the steps and across the pavement to the car, experiencing no pain.

I took her to the station as she had asked, and saw her onto the Nottingham train. Her aunt would meet her at the other end. Everything would be all right. I needn’t worry.

I rang her often over the next few days, and heard evasion on the other end of the line. “Not yet,” became her stock phrase. And silence was another stratagem, an unaccustomed silence so that I found myself asking whether she was still there. “Of course I’m still here.” But I didn’t see what was inevitable about it. “When are you coming back? I want to see you, Jean. Don’t you understand that?” It was difficult for me to put it into words. I had been trained in the skills of evasion and concealment as much as in the techniques of DNA analysis. If you are as vulnerable as I am, you acquire reticence with your mother’s milk: “I miss you.”

“Please, Ben, please.” But “please” was never formulated into a request. It never became “please do this” or “please do
that.” It was no more than a plea for suspension, for indecision, for keeping things the way they weren’t and never had been. Perhaps it was the tide of hormones that had swept through her, I don’t know. Hormones make changes: they are the molecules through which the mind exerts its effects on the cells and vice versa, chemicals that latch on to proteins embedded in the cells’ membranes and, by so doing, switch on functions as yet unobserved and unimagined. Thus the androgynous child becomes man or woman; thus the adolescent becomes boisterous and belligerent; thus the mother becomes maternal or the bereaved becomes despondent; thus the mouse turns rat.

When she finally came up to London it was on a day-return ticket, almost as though she had come for negotiation. We went for lunch to The Pig and Poke, and it was as though we were meeting on neutral ground. Eric was strangely silent behind the bar. “Nice to see you back,” he said, and phrased it as though it might be a question if she cared to answer it. But she just smiled and said thank you and took a slice of quiche—“your favorite, isn’t it, love?”—and sat down with me.

“I don’t know, Benedict,” she said when finally we began to talk. “I just don’t know. I feel … different.” She fiddled idly with her food, avoiding my eyes. “You won’t tell Hugo, will you? About what we did.” I hope you noticed the past tense there, gentle reader. I noticed; oh yes, I did. This is a verbatim record, I assure you. I was sensitive to the slightest nuance, the faintest hint, the mere breath of betrayal. I had a tape recorder in my brain. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about us,” she said.

“So have I.”

She gave a little, gray, distracted smile. “I’m sure.”

“And what conclusion have you come to?”

Silence. Choosing her words took time, time to sort the original from the dross, the insight from the platitudes. She selected the platitudes with unerring accuracy. “It was strange. Strange,” she repeated. “Strange and wonderful …”

“But?”

“But not right.” She looked to me for agreement.

“It seemed all right to me—”

“I wasn’t myself, you see—”

“Perhaps you were yourself for the first time in your life—”

“And I did things I shouldn’t have done. We,” she corrected herself, “
we
did things we shouldn’t have done.”

“Shouldn’t have? Who’s making the rules, for God’s sake?”

She looked away, across the bar, toward the electronic pinball machine with its flashing lights and its starships and its inter-galactic spacewomen with pointed breasts and swaths of blond hair and atomic laser guns. Mousy Miss Piercey, on the survival side of an abortion, of an extramarital affair, of life itself. “I don’t know,” she said. “But there
are
rules. There
must
be rules.”

“Oh, come on, Jean,” I retorted. “For God’s sake, grow up.”

She looked back at me with that thoughtful smile. “Isn’t it curious that the less people believe in God the more they invoke him?”

“Where did you read that? The
Reader’s Digest?
”

She fiddled with her food. Her hands were beautiful. Have I said that before? Her hands were truly beautiful, slender and silken and articulate. “I’ve been in touch with Hugo,” she said eventually. “I’ve spoken to him. He rang me up—I don’t know how he knew I was at my auntie’s, but he did. He was very upset.”

“Aren’t we all? It makes me really happy to find that he’s no different from the human race.”

“You’re being sarcastic as usual. He was tearful.”

“Tearful? Don’t make me laugh.”

“And he wants me back. Not on his terms. On mine.”

One of the customers strolled over and began to play the pinball machine. It buzzed and shrieked and flashed, as though it didn’t believe what she said either.
Tilt!
it shrieked.

“And what might your terms be?”

She ignored my question. “That poor little mite,” she said, thinking suddenly and erratically of the child that never was.

“Might have been,” I retorted.

“Don’t try to be clever, Benedict.”

“The poor little mite is dead, Jean. You can’t have second thoughts now.”

She stared at me in surprise, as though the idea had not occurred to her before. “It was a kind of murder, wasn’t it? Expedient murder.” I’d never heard her use language like that. It was almost more shocking than if she’d said “fuck.” She was right, of course. There’s no way around it. Murder.