by Graham Swift
Our vet knew, for one. And I think Otis knew, for another. I know that sounds preposterous. He could hardly have been listening, you’re thinking, on that examination table, to what I said to our vet. Has your mum gone daft? But I think he knew anyway, even before that. Cats can tell things, perhaps.
Why do people have pets? And why do they sometimes vanish? The simple, primal instinct of escape: Archie flying to the antipodes? Otis recovered, thanks to Alan Fraser, but it was a false recovery. Later that year he relapsed. I think he knew. He knew that the time was coming when his role in our lives would be over. He didn’t need Alan Fraser to spell it out for him. He knew, perhaps, even from that time we’d left him in Carshalton and I’d cried my eyes out, but really for my father. He knew even better than I did.
But that’s not all he’d have known if he’d truly been able to listen in to my conversations with our vet.
Biology’s just a ruthless tyrant? It was all just to do with that famous biological clock ticking away inside me, at thirty-two a good deal more loudly than at twenty-six, so that even Otis could hear it and recognise it? If only it were as simple as that. I need to tell you that it wasn’t nearly so simple, and I’m not going to pretend to you, anyway, that in her early thirties your mother had become a mere pawn of biology.
I still had my qualms—as I told our vet—about that little procedure so cheerfully called “artificial.” It’s artificial, and it’s not artificial. A simple business, a few moments in a clinic, it doesn’t even hurt, but it wasn’t just Mike who flinched, believe me. It’s clinical and detached and impersonal, but it’s not, exactly. It’s all done with a test tube, so to speak, but it’s still done with someone else, and rather intimately. And you may start to worry rather seriously about these things tomorrow—from the other end, as it were. Sperm isn’t just a general ingredient. It’s not like self-raising flour.
It might seem that it’s this man here beside me who’s most in jeopardy. Poor Mike. Marching orders! You’re no dad of ours. God forbid, my angels, God forbid. But is it so one-sided? You’ll have to tell me. Why am I lying awake like this, stirring my conscience? Mike’s the impostor—or just the hapless, innocent bystander? Of what was he the perpetrator?
You may look at it this way, though I don’t want to put the formulation into your heads: I’m your real mother, of that there’s no dispute or doubt, but I’m also the woman who, if by prior agreement and for the best of all possible reasons (I’m not sure you can quite escape being implicated yourselves), went and forsook your father and did it with another man.
Forgive me.
I’m getting to the really tough part now. It’s just as well I’ve established the rules of this story. It’s a bedtime story: exactly. I’m telling it, you’re fast asleep. It’s just as well Mike is too. The simple and hard truth is that, on my side of it, it wasn’t just a matter of having qualms to work through, of reopening a debate. It was a matter, since I would be the actively engaged party, of—how can I put this?—prior experimentation.
Give me a while to explain.
It’s possible that from tomorrow you will start to look at the whole world differently, not just this house in Rutherford Road. I’ve thought this through. You may start to look at complete strangers in a way you’ve never done before, but in a way, I assure you, I once started shiftily to do many years ago. And still do. It’s even a fair bet that you may start to look at your own faces in the mirror in a way you never have before.
I know a lot of that goes on anyway—the mirror-gazing, I mean. You’re teenagers, after all, the mirror’s your daily obsession. Kate, you’re already an experienced hand with the make-up, while oddly protesting (rightly as it happens) that you don’t really need it. Nick, you’re always looking for some real cause to use that razor. But you just look, anyway, at your faces. I’ve seen you. And though you both do it you like to catch each other at it, as if it’s something vaguely shaming and damning—as if, I’ve sometimes thought, when either of you looks in the mirror, you’re really gazing at each other.
Fundamentally (I know, I really do), you’re each of you looking to see who you really are. You’re looking to see that slow-about-it and fully separate creature actually, finally emerge. But now, from tomorrow, there’s going to be a whole new dimension to your peering.
The fact is, isn’t it: he’s out there somewhere?
What I thought, as I deliberated, and still wavered, all those years ago (sometimes looking at my own face in the mirror, as if that would help) was this. Suppose it were real. It’s tantamount to being real in the first place. Just because I’d never see his face—or, if it comes to it, any other part of him. Another man, who I’d never know. Another man, who wasn’t Mike. It’s why I’d balked that first time around, in the days when your dad talked to Doctor Chivers.
Maybe other women in my situation don’t get caught on this hurdle. They’re more desperate, perhaps, or more sensible. It’s just something that happens in a clinic. But it’s the union (can it be disputed in this age of DNA?) of two people. And the only way I could surmount this obstacle and know my own mind on the matter was to exorcise this ghost-in-advance, to do the real thing, in the flesh yet hypothetically, and see how it felt.
There, I’ve said it.
And after I’ve said a bit more, you may think it’s all the most blatant twaddle. I didn’t know my own mind then? I don’t know it now. And wasn’t I just talking about lying?
I was simply attracted, you may think, to our not unattractive vet, Alan Fraser. To his capable forearms, sleeves rolled up, as he handled Otis. To the way he made poor Otis purr, even in his poorliness. To his boldness and directness, even when—even because—it overstepped the mark. To the way he’d got so quickly under the skin of my “condition,” all the time looking at me with sympathetic, forty-year-old, but (let me say it) ever so slightly boyish, ever so slightly unwise grey-blue eyes.
Not to mention the fact, I won’t be coy about it, that he was attracted to me. One doesn’t miss these things. Those dark-suited clients at Walker’s, with their peeping red flames of breast-pocket handkerchiefs, not just looking at the pictures. Simon’s own little low-burning flame. Thirty-two: but I knew I’d gained something—lost something, the first flush, but gained something. (You’ll find out, Kate, how it works.)
Not to mention that safe, confessional, veterinary space in which all this occurred, under the chaperoneship of Otis. Now I’m confessing to you.
I even vicariously reversed the roles. That is, I pictured your poor dad—as a vet. Not such an unlikely job for a former biologist, nor such a bad one, and hardly a comedown, vets can make a decent living. Out of loyalty to your father (if I can say that), I didn’t disabuse Alan Fraser of his evident respect for the editor of The Living World. I didn’t say, it may be called The Living World, but it’s run from a roof in Bloomsbury. But then I’d already given him, a complete stranger, the full low-down on my husband’s spermatozoa.
Out of loyalty—and honesty too—to your father, I told Mike about these veterinary conversations, even about their non-veterinary element. I even told him he should make the acquaintance of Alan Fraser, and he did. They liked each other. And if the subject of families, of having them or not having them, came up between them, then, apparently, it didn’t cause ructions. Your dad didn’t feel obliged to hit Alan Fraser on the chin. Two scientists, two grown-up men.
Your dad would even say he was sorry, a few months later, when Fraser rather suddenly moved to a new practice, less than a year after he’d arrived.
I’m getting to the hard part. Now I’ve got there, there’s no point in wrapping it up. Here we go. Alan Fraser and I went away together one weekend. That’s even overstating it. It was a single night, a Friday night, you couldn’t call it a weekend.
That trip to Venice wasn’t the only business trip, or ostensible business trip, of mine in the first half of that year. I’d been to Paris, on my own, in January, and there’d been a second trip
to Paris in May. Except it wasn’t. May is a very nice time in Paris and this might have been another shameless opportunity for engineering a break for two, sponsored by W. and F. Especially as I was to be in Paris, apparently, on a Friday.
But this wasn’t so very long after Otis’s return and, though he was much on the mend, he was still in need of monitoring, still technically—under the vet. We could hardly cart him off to his cattery quite yet. And it was a time when we had things on our minds, our resurrected debate, that might only cloud the delights of a weekend in Paris. Your dad even said, “Another time. But stay over on the Saturday too, if you like.” He saw me, perhaps, wandering broodily round Paris, clarifying my maternal position.
No, I said, I’d come straight back on the Saturday morning. I didn’t want him to expect me to ring. Or vice versa. I wanted my own clean exit. But I gave your dad—it was a risk—the name and number of the hotel where I’d stayed before in January. He didn’t ask to see my plane tickets. Why should he have done? I’d have said, anyway, they were for collection.
I wasn’t in Paris at all. It wasn’t a business trip. Alan (shall I call him just Alan?) wasn’t offering Paris. I wasn’t exactly in a position to specify, but, to be fair, nor did he want to be cheap or to make me feel that I was. Definitely not his flat in Stockwell.
For me it all involved considerable subterfuge and deception. That’s not an excuse, but it makes me realise how much I needed to do it. He was unattached, a divorced man: a pretty poor witness, you might say, for having a family, the very opposite of what, at this point, should have enticed me. Though enticement, I’m trying to explain, wasn’t my only or chief motive.
He was on the lookout, of course, let’s not pretend about that. He was experimenting too, and might even have used that convenient word himself. Where would a divorced vet first start to look? I don’t know how many experiments he might already have conducted. But what I do know is that he was my only experiment, my only ever trial run.
And he didn’t take me to Paris, though he was eager to impress. I took a morning train to Gatwick, as if to persuade myself I still might really be flying to Paris. He picked me up there in his car and we drove around for a bit, round Sussex, killing time, and had lunch in a pub.
Then he took me to the Gifford Park Hotel, five stars even in those days. Do you see my dilemma?
23
ODDLY, I SEE MYSELF now sleeping, alone, in the Hôtel Gustave, rue de Grenelle, Paris, where I truly did sleep and truly by myself, at the beginning of that eventful year, 1978. Not knowing then, of course, how eventful it would be and certainly not knowing that in a few months’ time I would have pretended to have slept again in that same Paris hotel, while in fact I’d slept much nearer home and not by myself. If you’re going to tell a lie, give it some dose of veracity.
And even when I slept with our vet, Alan Fraser, in Sussex in May, I thought about myself in Paris just four months before in January, but as if I might have been thinking of some other woman, some innocent me of long ago. It should have been the other way round, perhaps, I should have been innocent in spring, devious in winter. January and May: it’s a proverbial motif, a not so uncommon subject for the painters of the past. As you know only too well, since among our Rutherford Road collection is a small depiction of just that personified theme by the Venetian artist Vareschi. Gennaio e Maggio. Vareschi, by any art-historical rating, can’t claim to be much more than a very minor old master, but his work commands a price and it’s a measure of something that we possess one at all.
There he sits, anyway, January, that is, scrawny and grey-bearded, contemplating an almost naked and extremely nubile May in some verdant enclave which could be the corner of an orchard or a fanciful wood. Fruit, in any case, of an indeterminate but vaguely testicular kind, hangs among the foliage—it seems to be autumn as well as those other months of the year—and there are some roses with particularly pointed thorns.
You may have wondered, in your strangely dainty way, how such a thing could have its place in our house, or ever have been put into a gilt frame at all. It’s a dirty old man, isn’t it, eyeing up young flesh? Except, of course, it’s “art,” which justifies all kinds of things, and it’s pricey, it’s that business of your mum’s. And, incidentally—though what do you care, at sixteen?—it’s a perennial and much-visited allegory, it’s the whole sad tale of existence. The ageing male, his virile powers in decline, goes looking for some vision of lost youth. He picks up a young girl and takes her off to a hotel. For some curious, perennial reason, the young girl frequently obliges. January’s also, if Vareschi makes no allusion to it, the double-headed, the two-faced one. The whole thing often involves cheating on a wife.
Hardly at all the situation of Alan Fraser and me: him at forty-one and divorced, and me at thirty-two and married.
But I thought about that woman of only that preceding January as if I might have been thinking of someone half my age.
The weather had been true January weather, cold and still and sparkling, the kind of winter weather that can make the stone of Paris radiate. I’d found time, then, to walk, not broodily but simply contentedly, by the icy Seine, the water and the white walls of the quais dazzling, my ears pinched by the air. And I’d wished Mike was with me, our vapour-breaths mingling. Was there any glad moment of my life he shouldn’t share? All the same, I’d inhaled the strange pleasure of a separation that was hardly a separation at all—just a Wednesday night in Paris—and was almost over now anyway.
It would have been the same sort of morning in London perhaps, I thought, the same light teasing the charcoal grey of Bloomsbury and touching the windows of Mike’s cramped attic-office, up among the gnarled and mottled branches of the plane trees that fill the centre of Ormond Square.
Now we have our own place in France.
It was just a week before your dad’s birthday, and I’d even just bought him his present, in an antiques shop in the rue Bonaparte. It was one of those little brass calendar devices which you put on a desk, with a rotatable display of the day, the date and month: a particularly finely shaped and engineered example, elegantly scrolled and chased, with a pen-rest combined and with the pleasing distinction that the dates were, of course, in French. I saw myself, before I wrapped it, setting it to that all-important date for your father (and for me): “le 20 Janvier.”
Now it sits on his desk in that study-cum-office, the black numbers and letters on the white enamel regularly turned. And if you’ve ever wondered: well, I bought it in Paris in January, 1978. Not such an inexpensive whim for me then. Now we can buy a Vareschi. I saw it in the shop window just as the shop was opening, went in and didn’t hesitate. An electric fire blazed away while I counted out my francs. As I stood in that crystalline air on the Pont des Arts, taking in the classic view, my purchase waited for me, to be collected after my stroll, on my way back to my hotel. Then I’d check out and fly home to Mike.
Will he remember to turn on the date tomorrow? Or will he want it to stay always at yesterday? “Le 16 Juin 1995.”
There are points in our lives which, if we don’t know it at the time, we look back on later and see ourselves as if suspended, poised on some mysterious fulcrum. What did I not have then to be thankful for? All of Paris scintillating before me. I simply didn’t know what that year would bring, or take away, or what other hotel rooms I’d see, as well as that one at the Gustave, even before the year was half through. One by Lake Windermere, one in Venice. One, in between, at the Gifford Park. And that one in Paris, in a manner of speaking, twice.
An experiment. A practical, empirical (but top-secret) stage in our ongoing debate and, as it turned out, the decisive one. Your mother’s just playing with you? She was really just up for it with this veterinary surgeon with his hands on her pussy cat? She really just felt, at thirty-two—not exactly young and foolish, though she’s forty-nine now—like acting as if she was nineteen again at Sussex and screwing around? Here was another one to try. I don’t think
so.
What you don’t have you can’t lose. But then again, it’s at least partly true that you don’t really know what you have until you lose it, or risk doing so. You don’t know the real things until you’ve sampled the false. At some point as the years gather, it’s bound to come over us perhaps: the perverse and crazy, but oddly almost prudent wish to put the whole fabric of what we possess to the test.
Excuses? I just went to bed with this Alan. Alan! And Fraser, you may have been thinking, is a Scottish name. I let him pick me up in his Peugeot and carry me off to spend a Friday night in a country hotel. I had my reasons, but where did he think it might lead: just one night? It was just such a previous exercise, it turned out, that had landed him in divorce. He made the mistake (the serious mistake, I think) of telling me. It wasn’t calculated to make me feel good. A little weekend escapade, he said, which shouldn’t have been any more, but he’d tumbled further, so it seemed, and then, when it was too late, this other woman (unnamed) had ditched him. Punished at both ends, and at one of them by the upset of his whole domestic apple cart.
What was I supposed to say? “There, there?” Or “Tough?” Or even “The cow!?” And now, of course, with me, he was risking nothing, having already lost the lot.
I could be risking everything I had.
I think what people often want from these midlife episodes (and note how I speak from vast experience) is a rather unexciting thing: comparison. They haven’t known it for a while, it’s been one of the rules that they forgo it, but is it, anyway (and this is the real persuasion), such an outrageous thing? They want the reassurance, the instruction or perhaps the sheer surprise of comparison. Life cuts you off from comparison. It might have been someone else, not Mike. I might never have met Mike. Poor me! And if not Mike, then it would have been someone else. Nothing’s written in the stars.
But I, of course, had my quite specific and highly specialised reason to know what it was like, while still having a husband, to jump into bed with another man. Did he appreciate that he was a “test case?” Perhaps he did—after those conversations in his surgery, all that scurrilous talk of insemination. It might even have been a sort of card he played, an unusual but opportune seduction technique. And I was “seduced.”
