by Graham Swift
It plainly didn’t work, then or for another six years: things you must surely have considered. Four years until we married, starting from that fabled meeting on Brighton beach, then another period, twice as long, before we got round to having you. But we didn’t leave it too late, clearly, and parents like to have a little time before they enslave themselves to the next generation. All the same, you must know—which puts a very different colour on it—that we were very much meaning and intending and trying, at least as long ago as that spring of 1972.
We were definitely trying. I wouldn’t like to say for exactly how long. I would have kept a note, at least a mental one, of when exactly we went “ex-contraception,” but it’s gone. It had been a long while anyway. You don’t expect that it will be bingo, first time, you try again, but how long is a trial period? Or periods?
What was significant about that year of Uncle Eddie’s death, even for your lives, even right back then, was that it was the year, the summer, in which we made a solemn, slightly shamefaced, but apparently necessary agreement that we would each go to the appropriate clinical facility, to have ourselves tested. We looked sadly and sympathetically at each other, as if one of us might have to choose, heads or tails, and one of us might have to lose. At this stage we still hoped.
But I have to say—and you must both be starting to muster an intense interest—that this was, in all we’d known so far, the worst moment of our lives. Little war babies to whom nothing especially dreadful, let alone warlike, had happened. The divorce of your parents, the death of an uncle—these things, for God’s sake, aren’t the end of the world. But this little crisis, even before we knew it was insuperable, was like a not so small end of the world. In one, strictly procreative sense, it might be exactly that.
You yourselves may think, before you think any further: hey, come on, what was the great tragedy? Had some terrible accident occurred? You yourselves, putting yourselves in our position (though how exactly do you do that?), may think: but what had so drastically changed? Wasn’t life, weren’t we, just the same? Though wouldn’t that be—forgive me for thinking the next thought for you—only to cancel out yourselves?
These are the 1990s, I know, not the primitive Seventies. Sometimes I think you live in some cool and remedied world where every glitch has its fix, every shock its shrug. But we’ll see tomorrow.
It was a blow, my darlings, a true blow. And where it truly hurts. It turned out there was a problem and that the problem was your dad’s, not mine. To make matters worse, I got my all-clear first. I was reproductively A1. Your dad had been slower about things or he’d just got a later appointment. I think he’d assumed that, what with all the gynaecological complexities…Let’s see what they say about Paulie first. I think he was being a typical bloke. It surely couldn’t be anything so simple, so simple and deflating, as you know what. But now he had to go down to the clinic for some further testing and double-checking and to receive his final judgement.
If only he’d known—when he was screwing around at Sussex, before he met me, and being careful or, apparently, lucky. If only I ’d known. All those years on the pill. But, of course, that wasn’t the point. There were no real jokes to be made along those lines, none at all. If I’d known—well, I’d have known. And if he’d known, before he met me, then by some bizarre process of honourable self-sacrifice that is hard to imagine, he’d have had to tell me, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t he? By all that’s fair and right, he’d have had to tell me, pretty soon. And I’d have had to respond, wouldn’t I? Pity your poor mum. And that moment in the sand dunes at Craiginish perhaps would never have happened. Mikey and me would never have been Mikey and me.
We didn’t use, we carefully avoided, the word “fault.” And if it was your dad’s problem, it was still, at least for a little while, not beyond all possible reprieve. It still might, depending on that final double-checking—depend. An unfortunate word, perhaps. My tests were at least just tests, passive tests. Poor Mike must have felt that his tests, even if he knew scientifically it wasn’t so, were tests at which he had to try harder, his very hardest, to do his upmost best.
One has to count so many things in life. Days, hours, minutes. Years, birthdays. Money. The miles between places. How many metres you’ll need for those new curtains. Calories, pounds, blood pressure, heart rate. Days since your last period. Your dad spends a lot of time, these days, counting sales figures. Once he counted baby snails. Is there a word for them: snailets?
But there’s one thing in my life I never thought I would be concerned with counting. You can’t see them, after all, though there are millions and millions of them, apparently, in any given—I don’t know what the right word is either—sample. It must be like counting shoals of herring, or hordes of frantic lemmings, but worse. How do you count them? I still don’t know. Ask your dad. And you’d think that if they were there by the million, you wouldn’t really have to count them all. You’d think that just one million or a good deal fewer than a million might be enough. Five, say.
But life is based, it seems, on this extraordinary percentage of waste. It would be like trying to count all these individual raindrops pattering down now outside, but blending into just one soft, continuous, murmuring gush. How many drops in just a minute, say, on just this house, on just its slippery roof and gurgling gutters, or on just the lawn below and the dripping garden leaves? And any given drop, potentially, life or death for some flower.
No, I’ve counted lots of things, but I never thought I’d become so keenly involved in counting sperm.
15
HE WENT TO SEE a man called Chivers. I don’t suppose he’ll give you these intimate details tomorrow. I never met Doctor Chivers. He made me think, inevitably, of jam jars. He made me think of Doctor Pope: all those visits for the opposite reason. Doctor Chivers said your dad was “less than two million per millilitre,” which still sounded like an awful lot to me. But your dad, who was a biologist and didn’t need a doctor to tell him, said, “Or about one chance every blue moon.”
So, there you are. You were a chance—two chances—in a blue moon.
Nothing changes, of course, nothing is outwardly different. When a man is given this news, nobody hangs a sign round his neck, or anywhere else, saying “Out of Order.” It’s true of so many things in life, perhaps. It was like, I couldn’t help thinking at the time, when a woman first becomes pregnant. No one would know, she may not even know herself, but no sign lights up for other people, even if it does for her. No one can tell if the girl or boy who was a virgin yesterday is no longer a virgin today. That’s an unfair example, perhaps. There are all kinds of ways in which life just carries on and no one would know.
But now you know. Now you know what the score was for us, over twenty years ago. It was under two million, but call it zero. Which doesn’t explain one very obvious fact, does it? Your dad will explain tomorrow, your dad will talk you through it. But there’s still a lot more of the story left which he won’t or can’t go into. And he can’t explain anything without explaining that for six years—it’s a strange way of putting it perhaps, but it’s how you yourselves might look at it, and it’s only fair you should know—we decided against you.
It was the option that won out, of the limited options that were available. Try not to blame us. Other options were discussed, and there was one that very nearly succeeded—and remained, as it happened, on the shelf. But the option that prevailed was to do nothing. No further action required. To be and to stay just as we were, a couple, a childless couple. It’s only a sad expression if you choose to see it that way. And anyone else, such as your grandparents-in-waiting, might have thought, impatient as they may have been getting: well, they’re just biding their time, they’re not “ready” yet. And then had the second, non-interfering thought: or perhaps—they’re just happy without.
Happy without. Isn’t that possible? Weren’t we happy with each other? That was surely, with us, a given. And isn’t one sorry reason for having childr
en to make up for a deficiency of happiness, for something that doesn’t seem to be there any more? If happiness is a completeness, then what does it matter how many components go to make the whole? If two can complete the circle. Let it be just us.
We never thought of you, you’ll be pleased to know, as little remedies.
But first you must know that for a little while after Doctor Chivers’s pronouncement—Mike’s not going to tell you this and perhaps your mother shouldn’t—we simply couldn’t do it. Complete the circle. Make love, I mean. The very thing that should have been our comfort and mainstay, the very thing we’d always done a lot of and, recently, with a good deal of application. That had never been our problem.
They say this is a common reaction, and Doctor Chivers may even have touched, gently, with your father on such possible repercussions. But I don’t mean just your father, for whom, I could see, there was a question of “manhood.” I had my own disinclination. There was a question of “womanhood” too. There’s a time for such big words. For quite a few nights we slept together, to use that ever ambiguous phrase, as if seized by sudden chastity. There was a gap between us, just a little gap of inches in our bed, but it might have widened like a crevasse—and what would you have ever known? I think Mike feared it would. I think he feared me. Judgement day. Marching orders. Cruel biology speaking.
But, look, he’s still here. Fast asleep.
Just us? But enough of that “just.” We came out of this period of quarantine. Let’s not be so feeble—or so ungrateful. Not the end of the world: this world that had been so kind to us and that can be a lot more terrible. We started to make love again, and with a new—I don’t think it’s the wrong word—potency. And that’s just what it was now, making love, since it wouldn’t be making anything else. Love without any dues to pay to reproduction. And I think we became better at it and more ardent. Just love. But enough of that “just.”
This was the time when we started to appreciate, since it was to be just the two of us, going away for weekends. The era of hotel rooms. A time when we were not exactly rolling in it, but we could afford, not having other commitments, these occasional gifts to ourselves, which sometimes came, anyway, courtesy of Walker and Fitch: art-dealing assignments to which we’d attach our private pleasure trips. Venice, Rome, Paris…We made just love in some fine places.
Art and sex, there’s never been a clash for me or (though I’ll never ultimately know how it works with Simon Fitch) any question of an either-or. Paint’s sexy stuff, and isn’t so much of painting to do with the rendering of flesh? Doesn’t paint sometimes ache to be flesh? Art’s not so artificial.
And these were weekends, in case you’re now feeling a little left out, that, with or without the help of art, weren’t just consumingly sexual. I think we both felt it: as if in our brave undertaking to be just us we’d left a small corner for magic. This was our last thin unscientific but fervent hope. How silly, but how sustaining. If we just made love keenly, resourcefully enough. If we just made it enough. As if Doctor Chivers had offered it as his final unofficial nose-tapping advice. Try going away for the weekend—if you know what I mean. A change of scene, a special room, a special bed…
And as if we’d only followed his recommendation. Let’s see if that room in Florence, with the shutters closed, bright-slitted, against the hot afternoon, won’t swing it. Or if that place in the crisp, autumnal English countryside, with the oak panels and the log fires—October swelling the rose hips outside—won’t just do the trick.
You see, you were never entirely out of our secret thoughts.
Reactions and repercussions. Doctor Chivers might have warned, but it was hardly his province, that this little thing, this mere trifle of a million here, a million there, can have its extraordinary behavioural consequences, its delayed and long-term side effects—and not really side effects at all.
Tim Harvey would never know just how perfect his timing was. If your dad hadn’t been so—indisposed. Or do I really mean disposed? If Tim, with Uncle Eddie newly in his grave, hadn’t made his approach rather like some dispossessed parent himself. Your dad took the job at The Living World, in any case. And I let him, God help me. A dead-end job as it seemed at the time, with more than a touch about it of the self-destructive. Not to mention the destruction of those snails. He said “twenty-seven,” didn’t he? He didn’t hesitate in giving that answer. He’d just stuck, inside, at twenty-seven. There’s part of me that’s still twenty-seven too.
A dead-end job, that might have turned, in the fullness of time, into merely our embarrassing consolation. Merely! Look, we have no kids, but we have the Living World. And yet—isn’t the story almost too good?—we’ve shared the treasure with you. The gift and the consolation too. There was a time when you were small, you’ll perhaps remember, when we told you we have “two houses now.” Meaning this one here and your dad’s “other one” in town. Since that attic in Bloomsbury had expanded downwards, Living World Publishing suddenly being on the up and up. The firm of architects who occupied the lower floors moved out—expanding, themselves—and your dad opportunely moved in. 12 Ormond Square. A very fine house too, a lovely fan-light over the front door, though we weren’t suggesting, I hope, that your dad actually owned it and we certainly didn’t want to give the impression that he might be going to live there.
But I’m jumping ahead again, years ahead, to when we were already taking those holidays in Cornwall. Gull Cottage, a third temporary little house. Come back—if you can do it—to life without you.
It was possible. It went on for several years. Don’t be offended. Looking back now, it can even seem to me like some sweet and not unsunny and perfectly legitimate plateau. Just your dad and me. Don’t hold it against us. Mike in his attic in Bloomsbury: at least it was a Georgian attic in a beautiful Georgian square, and not so far from me in St. James’s. Lunches in Soho. I’d invariably pay. But we weren’t so hard up, thanks to Walker’s, even if these were the parsimonious Seventies. Your dad would sometimes say, as if in self-defence, that there simply wasn’t the money around these days, even at Imperial, for pure research. I didn’t argue.
Uncle Tim, breaking his own parsimonious habits (for a supposedly wealthy man), would sometimes treat us, like a forgetful guardian, to liberal lunches. I’d have the weird feeling, as he poured the Sancerre, that some legacy was under review, some announcement might be made over coffee. Or your Grandpa Dougie (without Margaret) would regale us at the Connaught, asking nothing in return, I sometimes felt, than that I should make it the occasion of a little announcement, which was never forthcoming.
He would be seventy-five soon. Perhaps I might make that little announcement, and how it would make his day, at his birthday party. He would divorce Margaret soon. Marry Georgina. Oh Daddy.
Our Brighton, our Sussex, our London—its gravity shifted from Earl’s Court and the King’s Road to the West End. And to unglamorous, unassuming, unexpectant Herne Hill. Count your blessings in life. Good, time-honoured counsel. Count your ample blessings. Stop counting sperm, that’s been done. No one knew our little secret. We could even manage to ignore it, to forget it, ourselves—leaving just that space we never mentioned for miracles. What you never had, you can’t miss, or fear to lose. More sound, homespun, reassuring advice.
And, anyway, one day, for no particular reason, we got a cat.
16
IT WAS MRS. LAMBERT at number twenty-three who put us up to it, or rather, who nobbled your father. In those days every quiet inner-suburban street had its complement of kindly, plucky old ladies, living all alone in their three-bedroomed houses as if they’d never done otherwise, but taking a beady-eyed interest in young couples like Mike and me. I wonder where they’ve gone.
Mrs. Lambert didn’t live all alone, exactly. She had two cats, Toby and Nancy, and one day she cornered your father by her front gate and said that Mr. Nokes, the vet in Wells Road, had a lovely black cat going right now, a rescued stray, just a handsome black mogg
y. Who would want to abandon such a thing? She was just passing it on, but there’d be no harm, would there, in our going to have a look?
I don’t think Mrs. Lambert’s neighbourly wheedling would have worked so well on me. But there you are, when your dad was in his twenties he was a soft touch for little old ladies. And your dad might have ignored it, but he mentioned it to me, as if he had a duty to please Mrs. Lambert. He said that Mrs. Lambert had said that if it didn’t find an owner soon, well, you know…And, put like that, it made us seem like callous murderers if we didn’t go and take a look.
I said, “For God’s sake, Mikey—a cat? A cat?” But we went along to take a look. And we were sold.
This is the simple truth that I don’t think your father will mention tomorrow, though, arguably, he has even more invested in it than I do. Before there was you, there was a cat. But it goes a bit further, since it would be true enough to say that you owe your existence, your very genesis to a cat. You came from a black cat called Otis. A remarkable train of events, since Otis, like so many cats, had been well and truly neutered. But without Otis you might never have found your way into the world.
There, it’s out of the bag. A secret that’s never really needed to be a secret—I mean the existence of Otis—but we’ve kept it so, all the same. You’ve never heard us, at least till very recently, even mention his name. He died before you arrived. He was still there, at Davenport Road, not so very long at all before you were born and we left Davenport Road when you were still three. I’m always surprised you have any memories of the place at all. Perhaps tomorrow you’ll try to dig up some more.
Otis. After Otis Redding, of course: the late-great Otis Redding, whose happy little paean, My Girl, had wafted over Brighton beach in the spring of 1966. And whose bitter-sweet but oddly buoyant ballad, Dock of the Bay, had later floated, one summer, over London—over Earl’s Court, over our basement and its red bedspread, over Mike’s snails in the lab at Imperial, where he sneaked in a transistor radio—and become, for some reason, our song, Mikey and Paulie’s song, the song of our togetherness, our co-existence, our future.
