Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  Or maybe Spence was making a devil’s bargain, which one day three people would rue, one of them an innocent child. Anna loved him, but she was not in love. In those black hours when she lay awake in the night, he could not comfort her. She believed that her career was ruined—doctoral students don’t have babies, househusband makes no diff—and she was heartbroken. What if someone came along who could break that spell? But your girl gets pregnant: you marry her. He was doing the right thing. That conviction would carry him through. It was like being in Morocco again. The hospitality, the smiling, the food you had to eat.

  No one could complain of Anna’s work. Being pregnant, like being on the point of death, concentrates the mind. Before the Carstairs weekend she had been thinking about broaching Transferred Y with Nirmal again. She was cured of this plan. She knew that Parentis could not chuck her out: but she didn’t know what the etiquette was with her supervisor. She asked Sonia. The older woman’s reaction was ominous. Clearly torn between the instincts of a northern matron and grim experience, she crooned over the pregnancy but advised Anna to say nothing. Sonia would break the news.

  “He’s not going to be a happy bunny. But he’ll have to lump it, won’t he. There’s such a thing as Equal Opportunities, he can’t get past that.”

  Anna waited, trembling, to hear what KM Nirmal would say to her. He said not a word. She only knew that the news had been conveyed by the change in his manner. It was not reassuring. In the team meetings, which were frequent because things were at an exciting stage, she was sidelined. In the lab he treated her with wounding courtesy. If he had to deal with her at length he would stare over her shoulder, speaking as if to a third party, for whom Anna was merely the ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “He’ll get over it,” Sonia comforted her.

  Anna had been constrained to walk down and visit the animals, after one of these distressing encounters, because there were tears in her eyes. She blinked them back. Spence thought her fears were wildly exaggerated or hormone-fueled or both, but Anna knew. She was dead meat. It would have been bad enough if she had been a young man who had insisted on getting married.

  Sonia brooded over the first successfully implanted pregnant mother of three sry sdf/sdf2 female embryos, who was receiving a constant stream of admiring visitors. The team just couldn’t get over her cleverness.

  “It’s because he thought so highly of you, love. The way he sees it, he’s put a lot of investment into you and now you’re taking the mommy-track. I told him about your Spence, but he doesn’t believe in househusbands. No, I still wouldn’t say anything yourself, not unless he speaks to you first. Let him calm down.”

  Anna stared out of the window at the familiar horizon. She hadn’t told anyone at Parentis except Sonia that she was pregnant, but of course Sonia had gossiped. Already Anna bore the pitying looks, the grinding strain of being counted down, counted out. She had to bear it. She had to get her doctorate.

  “He’s got a wife at home,” remarked Sonia. “A wife and grown-up kids. You’d never know it, would you? That should tell you something: he doesn’t mix the compartments. Home is home and work is work. She comes from a very conservative Hindu family. I think she barely leaves the house except to visit relatives.”

  Anna imagined fastidious Nirmal doing sex with one of those sullen uprooted peasants you saw in the local streets: ugly woolen coat over her sari, feet broadened by a barefoot childhood slopping out of narrow western shoes. It was shocking. “She’s not educated?”

  “Oh yes she is. She went to Girton, took a double first in history and politics. Then her parents arranged for her to meet Nirmal. She liked him, she married him, and that was it.” Sonia stomped the ball of her thumb down on the lab counter and twisted it as if she were squashing a bug. “That’s all she wrote. I’m not saying Nirmal’s a bigot, but that’s what he thinks has to happen. A woman puts her family first. He’s not far wrong. It’s still the choice most women make in the end.”

  Anna’s stricken face must have alarmed her.

  “Don’t worry love. Your Spence is a treasure. If I’d had someone like that… I tell you what though,” she added, patting Anna’s abdomen through her lab coat (Sonia was the first to introduce Anna to this insolent gesture). “Stick at one. It’s numbers two and three and above that really separate the mummies from the daddies. They did in my house, any road. You still don’t feel sick? Must be a girl. Girls are always less trouble.”

  It was true, the baby was no trouble. It made no hateful comments, no smug assumptions. Aside from the slight thickening of her waist, her distaste for spirits (which she’d never much liked), and the strange absence of tampons in her life, the baby made no demands.

  The first sry sdf/sdf2 pregnancy failed, no obvious reason why. It was a sad day. The lab mice were clones, but they had personalities. Fiona had been a favorite even before her rise to fame. These things happen. It was a set back, not a disaster. Poor Fiona was killed, she and the dead babies minutely autopsied, mulched, and spun, and their DNA pelleted for investigation. The process began again. Anna, who’d become the virtual-modeling queen, worked on a computer simulation of sdf2 expression, trying to find out what damage it might have done in other loci, in a female embryo.

  They moved into Anna’s house, 131 Albemar Road, a week before the wedding. It was a Victorian cottage in a row of later, chunkier buildings. It would have been charming, except for the dirty city thoroughfare outside the front door. They would get used to the traffic, and there must be something that would grow in the dank, enclosed tank of paving at the back. Ferns? Their furniture consisted of a double futon, a single futon, a microwave oven, a table, two chairs, and three cardboard boxes of Anna’s effects. The single futon was for Spence’s Mom, who arrived two days later. Spence had vainly hoped that there would be less of her than he remembered. No chance. She was as large and ebullient as ever, and hiding her grievous loss under a lava-flow of grand-maternal joy. Spence didn’t know if it was good or bad that his beloved was taking only a minimum of time off, because the next day his mother was speedily busy marking the bushes: deciding what would go where in the house, tidying Anna’s things for her, taking Spence out to scour the sadly deficient malls and stores of Leeds for essential little US household items. She was only trying to help. She was here to be Mom to both of them, to make things easier for lovely, clever Anna… When lovely clever Anna walked in and saw the results she closed her eyes briefly, once: and Spence knew it was all over. Anna the inflexible would never forgive this invasion.

  How could he blame either of them? He loved them both.

  Spence had invited they all to the wedding and a reception afterwards at 131, where snack food, catered by Spence’s Mom, would be served with cheap fizzy wine. To his surprise and embarrassment, they turned up in force.

  Ramone drove Daz from the church. They’d sneaked out early; no one was at home at Spence and Anna’s house. They sat in the car, Daz leafing through a glossy magazine looking at pictures of herself. Model: Daz Avriti. Why not her full name? You agreed to things like that, let people mark you with their spoor, because it didn’t matter. And then it did.

  She and Ramone were barely on speaking terms.

  “I’m not coming in,” said Ramone.

  “Oh? Why not? There’ll be free drinks.”

  “Because she means it.” The rabid one spoke through gritted teeth. “I came up to this fucking wedding because I thought I understood. She’s pregnant, she’s going to have the baby: good. Abortion is a slave’s option. A marriage of convenience: good. I believe in using the fucking system. That’s not what’s going on. I saw the way it was, in that slimy church ceremony. It’s Spence I’m sorry for, trapped by the oldest trick in the book.”

  “I really don’t think Anna meant this to happen, Ramone.”

  “Women always pretend its an accident; it never is. Deep down, they’re as callous as men about making babies, it’s a sign of prowess, that’s all it is. If you don’t want to
get pregnant you don’t get pregnant. There are no accidents; it’s a fucking scam.”

  Daz sighed. She got out of the car. “I’ll wait on the doorstep. Say hello to Tex for me.”

  Spence’s Mom stayed another ten days after the wedding.

  The day she left Anna pretended to go to work. It was a Saturday, and there were no procedures at the nursing stage. She took a bus from the city centre, out into the landscape that she’d watched for so long. She had meant to reach the moors; the bus didn’t take her that far; it left her in a village of one steep street crossed by another. The houses were grey stone. She walked up the hill to the church, a mass-produced Victorian box with a blackened spire. On a bench among the gravestones she sat examining her wedding ring. It felt uncomfortable, she’d never worn a ring before. Inside her belly the child snuggled closer.

  She had thought she would have a life exempt from births, marriages, and deaths. Vague dreams of having a family (Rob Fowler, two children, a house by a lake in the mountains) would never have materialized, because Nirmal was right. An ambitious lab scientist is supposed to have a woman (or else a staff of servants) to take care of the domestic. Either that or she works in the chinks, between career breaks, and everyone says, but look what she achieved IN SPITE of being a wife and mother! That was not good enough for Anna. So what now? Was she doomed to turn Spence into a woman? She recoiled from the idea: as she recoiled from Sonia Blanchard’s double-edged concern, and from her sister Margaret, beady eyes swift to cop Anna’s left hand on that appalling visit home, looking for the engagement ring (and finding none); as she recoiled from her mother’s reticent sympathy. She didn’t want Spence to be a woman. She would find another way, a fair and decent solution. She was Anna Anaconda. She would swallow family life: make it her own.

  The baby stirred again. Its movements had been distinct to Anna for a fortnight. She’d been keeping this to herself while Spence’s Mom was around, or there’d have been no end to the belly-fondling. She could tell him now. She slipped her hand inside her coat. Hello little fish. Such odd emotions. She had already convinced herself that the baby was a companion in her adventure, an invisible friend who comforted her when Nirmal was awful or Sonia unbearably smug. She looked for the jagged abyss in her mind, the terror of annihilation that had been eating into her soul since the morning she found she was pregnant. It seemed to be gone.

  When she got home Spence had returned from driving his Mom to the airport, in their new secondhand car. This purchase was a hideous extravagance, but you cannot keep an American around the house and not let him have any wheels. He was taking down the ancient, withered hanging baskets that had adorned, so to speak, the humble frontage of 131. They’d been annoying him.

  They went indoors. “Well, here we are,” he said. “Still together?”

  “Still together. Shall we take a tour around the domain?”

  The domain could not have been much simpler. There were two small rooms knocked into one downstairs, and a kitchen; two rooms and a bathroom upstairs. The second bedroom was to be Spence’s office, until the baby was old enough to need a place of its own. There was a semi-converted loft, with flat window in the roof. They passed through the rooms, rearranging things, removing traces, and finally climbed up to the loft, which was empty and virginal (Spence’s Mom having been unable to squeeze through the hatch), taking with them a bottle of red wine and some bread. It was the warmest room in the house and somehow a pleasant space. Spence had meant to buy cheese to go with the bread and wine, but he’d forgotten. They toasted each other solemnly. God bless the drug.

  Anna was resistant to antenatal procedures. She grumbled and growled at the time wasted in the ghastly waiting room, clutching a bottle of piss. Secretly she was appalled at the power of that place, which brutally transformed her from being Anna, still herself, striving with a perilous adventure, into a pregnant woman. She jeered at Spence’s US conviction that you couldn’t have too much intervention. I’m a sex scientist, she told him. Believe me, I know. If you work in the kitchen, you don’t eat in the restaurant.

  Spence said, “Oh, hey, I think I hear those hormones talking.”

  Who would have thought gentle Anna had such a temper on her? It must be the hormones, or maybe she was getting to trust him with her faults at last.

  At twenty weeks she consented to an ultrasound scan and irritated the registrar by being able to read the screen better than he could. The baby was a girl. They named her Lily Rose Lyndall. Lyndall after the heroine of The Story of an African Farm, a proto-feminist text once read by Anna under Ramone’s influence. Lily Rose after Spence’s favorite painting, John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. In that same week Anna discovered she was not going to the conference in Zurich where the team was making a big presentation. She boldly asked Nirmal why not.

  “You will be heavily pregnant. You should not be flying.”

  “Not quite seven months. I could still fly. Or I could go by train and meet you—”

  “It would not would be suitable.”

  Anna held her peace. Nirmal felt betrayed? So did she. But until she had her doctorate, she would hang on. As she saw the odds that were stacked against her, she only became more determined. She would win through, with Spence and Lily Rose.

  They learned to get along together. They were very short of money, because Spence had blown his savings on coming over and that car, whereas the executive salary promised by Emerald City was slow to materialize. Anna found it hard to surrender the reins of government. Spence did more than his share of the cleaning and he cooked well, but he couldn’t stick to a shopping list or a budget. He actively preferred a regime that swung between feast and famine: it made life more interesting. She would have to get used to this. She would have to trust Spence. She prepared herself, determined not to falter. When her child was born, she must entrust Lily Rose to Spence’s care, the way fathers have trusted mothers to look after their children from time immemorial. When the child woke from a bad dream and cried for her daddy first, Anna must accept that. A real world of equal opportunities must have room for average, even mediocre househusbands, same as the old world managed with vast numbers of disorganized, inefficient housewives. And Spence was better than that. This will be my line, thought Anna. It carried her like music. She knew how to tackle the problem.

  On her birthday, in June, she came home from work at lunchtime (it was a Sunday) and found a strange van outside number 131. Indoors her father was sitting on their couch—the single futon they’d bought for Spence’s Mom’s visit, folded in three—having a cup of tea with Spence and two burly men she didn’t know, and there was a small, old-fashioned upright piano against the opposite wall.

  “She’s a Lancashire lass,” explained Richard, beaming. “Got to have a piano in the parlor.”

  iii

  Spence biked up the hill from the town centre, at the end of a warm and dusty day. He’d been working in the reference library. To build a good search engine, first you have to cultivate your own ability to find things in the equivalent of a teenage boy’s heaving heap of a bedroom, only it’s the size of a young universe. Then you have to know when to cheat. Noticing things as he went by: a Siamese kitten curled asleep in a window (Cesf, what am I going to do about him). A young Asian woman in a crisp white shirt sitting in the front of a car, enigmatic smile, holding a rubber plant in a pot. The smile made him think of Anna in that sketch by Tex the comic book artist. It had come over to England with the rest of his possessions. Anna looking at it, turning to him, he read the question unspoken on her lips: am I really beautiful?

  Yes, baby. You are lovely. Blame it on the tumbling dice. Can you hack that, can you live with the idea? A poignant waft of grilled meats from the good kebab shop. He had meant to cook a lentil casserole but forgotten to soak the lentils. Have takeaway, starve later. The Pennines against the sky, backbone of England, lumpy eroded vertebrate slopes, am I going to spend my life here?

  The house was stran
gely quiet. Anna was sitting on the futon-couch, an inward look—

  “Something’s wrong with Lily Rose,” she said. “She’s not moving.”

  Fear tingled down his spine.

  “Be glad of the rest,” he suggested, wrestling the bike into its slot in the narrow hall. The car was not for casual use, they were very broke. “She’s usually far more active than they expect.”

  “That’s why I’m worried. I noticed it when I was doing my yoga this morning. I’ve been waiting all day for her to stir, but there’s been nothing.”

  “Have you called Dr Marsden?”

  “She says she’ll see me in the morning and send me straight on to the hospital if there’s something wrong. Or, if anything else happens, I should go there straight away.”

  What did anything else mean? Premature labor? Hemorrhage? The baby was barely old enough to live, if it was born now. She was small, they said at the antenatal, but healthy… Neither of them slept well. Spence woke the next morning and saw in his wife’s eyes a dread and desolation that he tried to find reassuring. Monster pieces of bad luck do not give warning. Spence and Anna ought to know that. He drove her to the group practice and thence to the hospital. They could not find the baby’s heartbeat.

  At length they decided, with Anna’s agreement, to induce. The hormone was pumped into her womb via a catheter. Anna was in a slip of a room on her own, on the Maternity floor, indifferent to the demeaning things done to her body. She was deep inside, like someone buried in a cellar during an earthquake, listening to the far away sounds of the rescue that would not reach her in time. It took many hours for contractions to start. They gave her a sedative, it didn’t work. Spence slept on the floor. The Catholic chaplain visited briefly. He was attending to another woman, someone having a lateish abortion because she couldn’t cope with the idea of a severely disabled child. The priest felt that this poor woman was in more need of comfort and support, and Anna was glad to agree. After a day and a night, labor began. Anna worked for eight hours, Spence holding her hand, the midwife professionally encouraging. They were lucky to have the same one all through that shift.