Suppose it’s the
same room.
Oh lord. Suppose (is it possible after seventeen years?) it’s even the same bed. Mike would have gone for the best, of course he would, no expense spared. He’ll have asked for
the
best—one of the reasons he booked so long in advance.
I can’t get out of it. I’ll just have to pretend, smile and pretend. Or treat it as some grotesque and appalling opportunity for confession. On top of everything else? Mikey, forgive me, forgive me. It was, believe me, all in a good cause.
The trouble is I know that he—which really means we—will put it to
you.
We’ll ask you to judge us tomorrow in all kinds of ways, but we’ll ask for your verdict on this tricky secondary matter. Namely whether you think it’s right that, at this particular, traumatic point in your lives, we should swan off to a five-star hotel, leaving you here with the contents of the fridge.
But my hunch is that you will give us your “permission.” I can’t put myself in your shoes, but that’s my hunch, or in one sense it’s my earnest hope, since that will mean that what’s about to occur tomorrow will have gone, so far as such a thing can, “well.” But in one respect your letting us go off like reprieved offenders to celebrate our wedding anniversary won’t help me at all.
I want it both ways. I want both to go and not to go to the Gifford Park. I want you to listen to these things I’m telling you and not to hear them at all. You see what I mean? Every twist and turn.
A corner room. I can’t remember the number. It’s just as well, perhaps. There were aquatints of Sussex scenes on the wall. A sepia photograph of some tweeded folk piled into a shooting brake. It had a fine view, through a latticed, wisteria-hung window, of those ever-suggestive Downs. And it had a chintz-hung four-poster bed with spiralled-oak pillars. Picture your mother in such a room, seventeen years ago, an unfamiliar man beside her, rain falling outside, drenching the wisteria leaves. Did it really happen, that curious little enterprise? It seems now both insignificant and far off, and flagrant as a just discovered crime. And yet it served its practical purpose, it’s true to say that without that bizarre excursion, mysteriously involving a trip to Paris at the same time, there might never have been you.
Your dad’s shown me the glossy brochure he was sent. I already knew: a Jacobean manor house, seat of the Akenhurst family, grandly added to in the nineteenth century by the Giffords, who made a fortune in rubber. Our room—then, I mean, Alan’s and mine—was in the Jacobean bit. There was a creaking, ancient staircase that made you feel, at once, that you were engaged in an act of stealth. Long-bearded, white-ruffed faces watched your every step. It’s inconceivable that something so old and worthy of preservation can have been transformed beyond all uncomfortable recognition in less than twenty years. I can only hope.
Outside, there was, and must still be, a lovely garden: lawns, yew walks, fountains and some sets of just slightly vulgar statuary, a foible of the Giffords, depicting classical scenes. Diana and Actaeon inevitably, Narcissus bending over a pool. We’d done a tour of their half-clad forms before dinner. I thought of them out there in the rain, like creatures in some petrified zoo, the drops forming on the stone nipples and chins. The Giffords, with their rubbery new money, had gone for ancestry and myth.
His skin had its strange but distinct, personal-sweat smell: mine must have had, to him, its own smell too. An individual, yet generic scent. At thirty-two, I could just about remember it from earlier days: the animal tang of someone you’ve never been naked with before.
Or ever again, in this case. We didn’t waste too much time over our departure the following morning. It was clear, bright weather again. Sunlight gleamed in the puddles on the terrace. The curves of the Downs were like a sure draughts-man’s line. I’d slept eventually, and perfectly soundly. And my mind was crystal-sharp and made up. I knew it was all right now, I knew it was perfectly fine.
I asked Alan to drop me at East Croydon, so I could take the train from there. So I could muster again some token illusion that I’d returned from Paris, by a Gatwick flight which would have departed, allowing for the time difference, at around ten o’clock. Another train from Victoria to Herne Hill. I had only a light, one-night case. The rather slinky small black dress inside it would have been explained by the cocktail party I’d been required to attend.
I was ready to abide, scrupulously, by another pretence that in seventeen years your father has never even suspected, let alone uncovered. But he scarcely asked about my time in Paris, because very soon after I got back I changed the topic quickly and emphatically. Perhaps I’d overwhelmed him, anyway, in that still grief-shadowed spring, with the happy, glad-to-be-home light in my face, with the hug I gave him, pressing myself against him hard. It was a fine Saturday in May, not quite lunchtime. I said, “Let’s go for a walk in Dulwich Park, Mikey. Let’s have a look at the ducks. Let’s have a drink in the Greyhound. I did some thinking while I was in Paris, and on the plane just now. A.I.D.: I’m absolutely sure. No problem, I want to go ahead.”
24
LET ME MAKE ONE
thing absolutely clear, in case any doubt has entered your minds: Alan Fraser (
MRCVS
) is not your father. Neither of you has grey-blue eyes. We—that is, he—took all due precautions, in a hotel once owned by rubber barons. I’d rather lost touch, you could say, with such things.
In any case, that wasn’t the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise was—hypothetical. Alan Fraser isn’t your father, any more than Otis was. It’s just that without either of them, you might not be there at all.
But, of course, there must have been a
practical
exercise. It may not be wise to enquire too deeply into how we were brought about, but since the whole thing will be so calculatedly sprung on you tomorrow, since you’re about to discover that you yourselves were the work of painstaking calculation, you’ll at least want to know how the actual thing was done. Even if you don’t ask, you’re bound to wonder: you won’t be able to avoid a certain—image of your mother.
But, for all I know, perhaps you
will
ask. Perhaps you’ll both be uninhibitedly hungry for every graphic technical detail. Kids these days, they certainly don’t hold back. I’ve tried so hard to anticipate every possible form your reaction might take, from outrage to laughter, that perhaps nothing will surprise me. Perhaps you’ll even be
thrilled
to know that you were concocted in such a special way. You’ll want a badge for it (I hope not: what would go on it?). And you won’t feel at all like treading carefully. So, come on, Mum, spill it. We came out of a test tube?
No, not exactly. You came out of me—as I once explained, remember? When all’s said, there’s that wonderful fact and joy of my life, you came out of me. Have I ever told you how much I love you? Has your father?
It’s hardly a secret, anyway, how it was done, how it has to be done. A little mechanical thinking will get you there. It’s no more secret, mysterious or romantic, I’m afraid to say, than a visit to the dentist. To begin with, there was even a certain amount of dull bureaucracy, of form-filling and question-and-answer. First of all, we went along, the two of us, like responsible parents-to-be, to a place that dealt in such things and talked it over, in the strictest confidence of course.
We learnt the fundamental rule, which was the rule of anonymity. It’s the same rule for you, my darlings, as for us, we’ll need to make that clear tomorrow. There’s no way of
knowing,
even for you. You were conceived anonymously—or semi-anonymously, let’s more accurately say. Though, within the bounds of anonymity, it was possible to be selective, if not exactly fussy: skin, eye colour, hair colour. It was possible to attempt a kind of sketchy match. It was possible, I don’t mean to be flippant, to place an order.
This was when your dad, with all his resolve and resignation, got a little uncomfortable. This was when “He” began to loom, to seem suddenly close and actual, like someone who might already have been told about
us
and put on standby.
But my own nerves were steady. I’d been to the Gifford Park with our vet.
Then we signed the forms. Then I had some standard tests and was given an appointment, relative to my menstrual cycle. A little while before it, when it happened to be our anniversary, we went to Venice. Then one fine and sunny morning at the very end of June, I went back to the clinic and to a special room. Your father came with me. He didn’t have to—and I don’t mean that he came as well into that special room—but he drove me to the clinic, as if I were some fragile out-patient about to undergo something potentially upsetting. We both joked about this misplaced analogy, but somehow couldn’t shake it off.
I don’t know what Mike did, while I was—busy. He read the paper? He drank coffee in a Styrofoam cup from a vending machine? He walked round the block? Or he just waited, not in the building, but in the car park, in the car. That’s what he said: he’d be in the car, not in the building, where there were seats for waiting and magazines. Fair enough. When I came out through the glass doors he stepped from the car and walked towards me as if I might have needed help. Poor Mikey, what could he say: how did it go?
It doesn’t take very long. The
real
thing, after all, needn’t take very long. It all comes back to me now on this night: the ridiculous, bright-lit matter-of-factness. Like having an injection, a jab before you go on holiday. It had none of the momentousness of—tomorrow. I knew it might not even work. I didn’t even know whether to treat it, in my mind, as special or as merely functional. Both options seemed somehow treacherous. I tried, in fact, not to think at all. That’s the normal state of affairs, after all, with the real thing. It’s called conception, but who’s actually being conceptual?
It’s like a simple vaginal examination. So far as I know, Kate, you’ve not had one of those: a treat in store. A sort of speculum. Except something
else,
of course, is introduced. A nurse did the honours, a straw-blonde nurse of roughly my age (that pleased me) who introduced herself as Becky. I still, strangely, see her face, in close, physiognomic detail: a slightly too sharp nose, a slightly too thin mouth. Was she a mother herself or single? And how exactly was I to think of her? A
nurse
? A midwife? Hardly. A mid-husband, perhaps, a helping hand…And should you joke or be serious? It seemed somehow understood that too much humour would be inappropriate. Smiles and friendly efficiency, yes, but this was not quite a laughing matter. If the real thing sometimes can be.
Clinical neutrality—definitely no sexy dim lighting or soft music in the background. And, beneath it all, banishing the jokes anyway, the vague feeling that you’re doing something wrong, illicit or even, perhaps, harmful: you’re really having an abortion. I’m sorry, I’m only being honest.
Afterwards they ask you just to lie down and “rest” for a bit. I don’t know if it’s to encourage the natural processes or because they actually think you might be tired. No cup of tea and a biscuit—though I didn’t ask—and, of course, no post-coital cigarette. I did smoke a bit then too, as a matter of fact. I stopped, you’ll be glad to know, when I became pregnant. I might have stirred my tea, taken a drag and made small talk with Becky. “I’m here because of a cat, you know. Called Otis.”
So, not exactly a test tube. Though there would have been, I suppose, at some stage, a sort of test tube and someone, so to speak, would have been in it. A stranger slipped that day into our lives—an unfortunate phrase, since that’s just what he didn’t do, or not exactly, yes and no. When your dad saw me walk off to that special room I wasn’t in anyone else’s company, but when I walked out again through those glass doors you could say, in a manner of speaking, I was.
A stranger entered our lives—that’s not quite a happy phrase either. And not a complete and absolute stranger anyway, because of that preliminary vetting. I don’t seem to be able to get away from awkward puns.
In the “debating” stage, during those days and weeks after Otis’s return, and again when we’d made up our minds and contacted the clinic, I used to ride the train up to work, the Tube from Victoria to Green Park, and look constantly, furtively, at men around me. Perhaps not as furtively as I thought, and perhaps if they caught my eye they might have got the wrong idea. This sort of thing, after all, goes on all the time. But they could hardly have guessed the nature of my interest. They could hardly have guessed that I wasn’t just looking, but searching.
Even when I became pregnant I still looked. The truth is, I still look now sometimes. I’ve never stopped looking or searching, even though during the last sixteen years there have been long periods of time when I haven’t caught myself doing it. But your mother, I’m afraid, has a fundamental and incurable habit of looking at other men. This year, these last few months, I’ve felt the need to look a lot. And even when I don’t look, I still wonder. The more years that have gone by, in fact, the more reason there is to wonder. Suppose our paths have crossed, suppose we’ve actually looked, without knowing it, at each other. Suppose we’ve sat on the same train. What would be the chances? Beyond all reckoning? Sometimes, now, I have the strangely arresting thought: suppose he’s no longer alive.
But, assuming he is, he’s out there somewhere. Even now.
Do you see why I needed—I know it’s the most exotic of excuses—my fling, if that’s the word, with Alan Fraser? Not that it’s actually stopped those supposings. Not that it’s exorcised the ghost. And, of course, I can’t prevent myself having the reverse notion, on
his
, the ghostly one’s, behalf, though I know it’s absurd: that he’s interested in
me.
Or in
us,
I should say.
As if in this one case (how many other poor mums, after all, might he have serviced?) the iron rule has been broken and he’s had the privilege of knowing who we are. He’s been watching us all this time, unseen himself—from some special gallery. He even knows that tomorrow’s the big day. He’s been spying on us all these years, this happy family. Spying and perhaps waiting. He’s been counting the “last times” too: the “last” Christmas, your dad’s fiftieth—the last birthday of a so far successful impostor. He was outside that restaurant we took your dad to in January, peering in through the window at our table. He’s out there right now, poor man, getting soaked in the rain and waiting for the dawn of this day:
his
big day, in a way. He’ll be peering in at us tomorrow, perhaps, through the French windows, from behind the viburnum bush. Or—God help us—he might just crash through the French windows and make his sudden, dramatic, sopping-wet entrance.
Your real father, my demon lover.
I suppose Mike’s had all these thoughts too. He must have done, I’m sure of it. And what would the two of them do if they should come face to face? What would
you
want them to do? Shake hands, hug each other? Take a swing at each other?
And, of course, when I’ve done my looking on the Tube, walking along Piccadilly, wherever, I’ve been consciously looking in a way—given that vetting process—for Mike’s double, or something close to it. Another Mikey, a pseudo-Mikey, a quasi-Mikey, catching my eye for a fraction of a second, but not even recognizing me.
Isn’t it astonishing that your dad’s still asleep?
A third party entered our lives, a little before you did. Then he became, in due course, a sort of fifth party. Tomorrow he’ll be officially recognised as such, like a christening. From tomorrow you’ll know him about as well as we ever did, but it will be up to you, it has to be up to you, to decide how we should deal with him.
A third party entered your parents’ lives. A fourth party, if you count Otis, who I haven’t forgotten. And, just as with Otis, we had to find a name for him, a token, working name, since he came under that plain wrapping of anonymity. We didn’t even have a number. Not that we wanted or needed, in those early days, to refer to him that much.
Except, perhaps, to thank him.
Yes, to thank him. Will you possibly look at it that way too tomorrow? Even consider it at all, that you might like to thank him? The trouble is, that only begs that other enormous but entirely understandable question: that you might like to meet him. That’s impossible, though it may not stop you wishing it. It’s impossible now as it was back then even to get a simple message of thanks through to him. There are no channels. And how do you thank someone, in any case, whose name you don’t even know?
Tomorrow you may feel the need to give him a name of your own. It’s not such a small matter. You’ll have to use it for the rest of your lives. And perhaps we shouldn’t even mention to you the name we’ve used. Or we should humbly and graciously trade it in for yours. We thought of calling him many things: “Mr. D.,” for example, for “Mr. Donor.” Though that was tricky because “D.” might also stand for “Dad.”
Your
dad (what a mountain there is in such a little word) came up with some inventive and truculent offerings of his own, which may not be so amusing to you. Such as “The Grand Inseminator” and “Spunky Jim.” But in the end we settled on a formula that was neat and wholly to the point: Mr. S., short for Mr. Sperm.