by Weldon, Fay
Harold and Katie had tried to have children for eight years, unsuccessfully, before they agreed on the new and risky method suggested by Dr Holly, and Katie had the little female foetus implanted: but being pregnant, swelling up, did not bring the ease she’d hoped for, the sense of fulfilment she’d been promised. The fact that the baby was so close did not, when it came to it, make it feel less of a little foreigner, on the contrary: and Harold would not be present at the birth, which was just beginning to be fashionable, and in the end she’d have preferred to have adopted a baby in the usual way, actually seeing what she was going to have to live with for years and years, making much the same kind of choice as she had when she married Harry. ‘Like that, want it.’ Not a bad way, when it came to it. She was happy enough with Harry: they’d wanted a baby badly, so badly, because they wanted it, couldn’t have it.
Nothing wrong with little Julie, on the contrary: the brightest, prettiest, easiest little thing, Harry’s pet, too much Harry’s pet at first, perhaps that was the trouble, always sitting on his knee, him fondling perhaps overmuch, but how could one say a thing like that, except the baby wasn’t Harry’s flesh and blood, was it, and he knew it. Dr Holly might have been right when he suggested Katie didn’t tell Harry about the implantation, simply went home and said, ‘We’re pregnant! A miracle!’ but she hadn’t taken Dr Holly’s advice though, had she? Then the miracle did happen; when Julie was five (and playing Mary in the school Nativity play, of course) Katie did become pregnant, in the ordinary marital way, with a boy, a son, a firstborn no matter what Harry said, a wonderfully easy, natural birth, and Harry was there to hold her hand, and they called him Adam, and after that, really, though she was always perfectly kind to Julie, of course, that went without question, Adam was her real child, her only child, and when Julie, by then trained as a secretary and working in a local estate agent’s office, came home one day and said, ‘Mummy, I’ve met this wonderful man, Alec: he’s my boss, actually: I want to marry him,’ Katie said, ‘Of course, darling, if you really and truly love him’ and Julie said, ‘I love him with all my heart and soul,’ and who knew enough about her to disbelieve her, and Harry, who was having a secret affair with his own secretary, a girl Julie’s age, a serious affair, true love, and wondering whether he had the courage to leave Kate, and if he did would Julie and Adam ever forgive him, said, ‘Her life, her choice: pity about his wall-eye, but I suppose it makes the one that works the more acute, and the fellow’s got a good business future, that’s the main thing. When the chips are down it’s income that counts.’
And Julie married Alec, dressed appropriately in virginal white. (Neither believed in sex-before-marriage:
Julie: ‘What would Daddy think of me? He’d die.’
Alec: ‘I think marriage should be a sacrament: should really mean something.’)
The wedding took place in the village church, and it was written up in the Daily Telegraph, and their first house was on an executive estate. And after Alec had had his wall-eye fixed, thanks to new laser surgical techniques, there was no stopping him: they moved to bigger and grander estates, and he was away most of the time, developing holiday resorts, flying the world Club Class British Airways with his computer on his knee: and she never worried about other women: Alec really wasn’t interested, she knew that and she didn’t think she was or why would she have married him? She would have loved children but Alec couldn’t have them: and her father had left her mother and gone off with his secretary which had thoroughly upset Julie, but she had the cats and the dogs and the fish, and loved them, especially her little grey cat; she could run her hand over its soft fur and watch the light catch the grey and turn it into a hundred different changing shades and now suddenly she found herself in love with the vet, or rather he was in love with her, and it hadn’t been sex, really, just closeness – but who in the world was there to talk to about these things? Not Alec. For Alec the past was over. Like his wall-eye, better not remembered.
And how could you talk to someone who wasn’t there, but flying about the skies all the time? How could you talk to your husband about your lover?
There was no talking to her mother. Her mother had gone downhill since her father left. She ranted and raved and said odd things, which hurt. Julie thought she drank too much. ‘You’re no flesh of mine,’ she’d say to Julie, and in the same breath complain that Harry hadn’t been there at Julie’s birth, and Julie had bitten her on the way out: she’d been born with one tooth already cut. So how could she talk to a mother who wanted only to hurt and confuse her? And how could she not go to bed with the vet, because it was bed first and talking after, with him. She’d have been faithful if she could, but fate was against her. If she’d had friends, it might not have happened. She could have talked to them. But friends where she lived came in couples, talked in couples; you could go out to dinner and talk non-stop and say nothing: and disloyalty over morning coffee was not allowed: and besides, the others had children, and she did not. She was an outsider, alone and lonely. Of course she went to bed with the vet. But she didn’t want to. She would rather have been happily married.
And Gina? Ah well, Gina. Gina lifted her skirt to show the boys her knickers when she was nine, and took off her knickers to show them more when she was ten, and at twelve was deflowered in the back seat of a cinema, and at thirteen was hitchhiking down the A1 for the fun of it, and at fourteen was declared beyond parental control, and by sixteen was back home again and quite reformed and at eighteen was pregnant and married to Cliff, a would-be pop singer, and garage mechanic, and by twenty-eight had three children by two different fathers, but she’d still have been monogamous if she could. She’d had sexual encounters with some thirty men by the time she was married, fate being against her, and had felt altogether happy and at ease for perhaps ninety minutes of her life till then: the minutes in which she exercised proper sexual power over men, became the magnet to which they were drawn which could never fail; the minutes, however brief, just before actual penetration. From then on the man’s energies took over, she was neither here nor there, and it was no fun: sometimes, depending on circumstance, it was even horrific. The more of them, the less of her. She felt it.
Perhaps the seven-day-old Joanna-foetus that was to become Gina lacked some vital energy, or, if you look at it another way, perhaps some segment of the double helix of the DNA which so strongly and happily composed Joanna, Jane, Julie and Alice had become fused and blurred in Gina. These things do happen, chance intervenes, being no respecter of the wishes and intentions of geneticists, let alone microbiologists. Gina was implanted in the womb of an impetuous young woman, by name Annette, who’d come south from Scotland to start her life afresh, and had been swept off her feet by an earnest and intellectual bookseller named Douglas with exotic tastes and a wen on his almost bald head.
They were married within the week. She was a good cook and a fine bookkeeper and he needed both. She worked in the shop, typed the bills, learned the book trade, charmed the customers – and then she wanted a baby. Douglas didn’t. Later, later, he said, standing over her every morning to make sure she took her contraceptive pill. He didn’t trust her and was right not to. ‘I’ll do it another way,’ thought Annette, and went to visit Dr Holly at the Bulstrode Clinic, whose fame had spread throughout London in the late fifties as the maker or taker away of babies, depending on which you wanted. She told Dr Holly what she hadn’t told Douglas – that to date she’d had one stillborn baby, Down’s Syndrome, and four abortions. And Dr Holly said, since her husband’s sperm was unavailable, and her eggs not reliable, he could give her a baby of her own without either. And under local anaesthetic, there and then, he implanted little Gina.
Dr Holly wasn’t sure how long he could keep the processes of cell division going outside the womb; he said time was running out for this particular foetus; he could feel it. Carl May said he saw no reason for or evidence of any such deterioration, but Carl May, Dr Holly said, thus offending his benefactor, had
a layman’s view of the material world – that is to say he thought there had to be a reason for things to go wrong. Things just happened, as any scientist could affirm. You knew by the pricking of your thumbs. Had Dr Holly not been in such a hurry, he might well have rejected Annette as a suitable birth parent: as it was, he trusted to luck. There were more than enough wombs to choose from; he had little excuse; they thronged the waiting room of the Bulstrode Clinic, brought there by rumour. There were women who wanted babies, and couldn’t have them, or had babies and didn’t want them, women trying to save babies, women trying to lose babies, and most of them weeping or on the verge of weeping. Dr Holly felt, and Carl felt with him, that an evolutionary process which caused so much grief could surely be improved upon by man: genetic engineering would hardly add to the sum of human misery, so great a sum that was, and might just possibly make matters a good deal better. No doubt in time the techniques of artificial reproduction would be further advanced and manipulation of DNA itself made possible so that improved and disease-resistant human beings could in the end be produced. In the meantime, Holly and May did what they could; May providing money and inspiration and Dr Holly surgical deftness and experience. It was just he was perhaps, this time, in rather too much of a hurry.
So there Annette was, pregnant with a diminutive Joanna, who seemed less and less likely to reach her potential as the pregnancy proceeded. Annette’s husband, discovering her pregnant, threw her out of the house, claiming the baby was not his. She told him the truth, which made matters worse. (He’d tried to sue Dr Holly but lawyers would not take on his case: he was excitable and it sounded like sheer fantasy to them, a tale told by a guilty wife. In the end he gave up.) Annette, distressed, drank too much, smoked too much, went home to Scotland, had the baby six weeks early, failed to love it, left it with her parents, who, the more they feared their granddaughter would go the same way as their daughter, brought this fate upon her.
‘Mum,’ Annette would say, at the beginning, over the phone from as far away as possible, ‘she can’t inherit anything from me, because she isn’t anything to do with me. Her genes are different. I know what you’re going to say next. “We don’t let her wear jeans. She always wears a dress.” Christ, I could almost feel sorry for her.’ Then Annette drifted away altogether. Grandfather had a stroke, grandmother’s vision was impaired. Grandmother drank too much, mostly sherry. There were no books in the house. Gina learned to read from the back of the cornflake packet and the fronts of buses. She had a weak bladder and wet her knickers a lot which made her unpopular at school – a graffitied, run-down place – with both teacher and pupils. She was classified as disturbed, she was unhappy with herself, unhappy at home, beaten by teachers for answering back, frequently locked in her bedroom by her grandmother as a punishment for ‘being dirty’, frequently climbed out of the bedroom window, and on one occasion was helped by a passing alcoholic; as a result of which, being observed, she was taken to the police station as being out of control and put in a children’s home from which Annette reluctantly rescued her.
Annette who by now kept a junk stall on the Portobello Road and lived with a Rastafarian drug dealer.
‘You’re not mine,’ she’d keep telling Gina, ‘but no one deserves my mum and dad,’ and Gina would look down her straight disdainful nose and lower the lids of her bright blue eyes, in the sexy way she’d lately acquired, and wonder where she’d come from, if not out of Annette, and ate another chocolate bar to keep her somehow rooted, tied to the earth. The world outside kept changing, without apparent cause or reason, out of her control. She had a weight problem. If she didn’t keep herself heavy she’d fly off and be lost, like a piece of scrap paper. She went round with boiled sweets in her pocket, and boys knew by just looking at her she was anyone’s, which these days she wasn’t: her stepdad Bilbo belted her if she was, though Annette jumped up and down and told him he was a savage.
Gina liked Bilbo: he seemed to care what happened to her, and actually stir himself to do something about it, however painful. They ate good food, hot and rich with chillies; they watched a lot of TV; the cat had kittens: Gina begged and pleaded to keep the fluffy grey one for herself, and was allowed. Life was almost good. She did OK in school, too: caught up, quickly: would have passed exams and even gone to college (she wanted to be a doctor: how her mother laughed) except she met Cliff, got pregnant, wouldn’t have the abortion Annette suggested – ‘But it’s murder, Mum’ – and married him, and there was young Cliff, son of a Portobello repairer of clocks, who wanted to be a pop singer, obliged to be a garage mechanic the better to support her and baby Ben. And Cliff drank too much, though he went into car sales and ended up selling second-hand old Rolls-Royces, which you can buy for a couple of hundred in the trade and sell for a couple of thousand to fools, so they lived OK, except Cliff began hitting her, and she knew somewhere she deserved it, and she could no longer look down her nose so well, if only because it had been broken a couple of times. He was always sorry afterwards, and she was sorry for him and bound to him, and loved him in a kind of way; but she was never quite sure Sue was his, though she hoped so – it had been an accident, a one-night stand when she was really miserable, between a black eye and an apology, right at the beginning – and Cliff certainly had no idea, he would really have killed her, and in a way she was killing herself, she knew it, but how did you stop, once you had begun? But she would have been faithful, if she could. One life, one man. But fate was against her.
And Alice? Alice was implanted in the womb of Honeybell Lee Morthampton, a mother of four boys so anxious to have a girl she would not take the chance of another boy.
‘Let’s see,’ said Dr Holly, ‘we’ve only had frustrated wombs to date, eager and waiting. If we can make this one stick in an elderly multigravida with a history of rejecting females, we’ve really got it right.’
‘I don’t see,’ said Carl May, ‘why the womb history should make any difference; if hormone levels are sound, how can it? It’s like believing that a pedigree bitch, once it’s had pups by a mongrel, never breeds true again.’
‘But it doesn’t,’ said Dr Holly. ‘I have one and I know. The fleeting flavour of the brat about her last litter, purebred labrador though they are. Pure in theory, not in practice. There’s more goes on inside the womb than meets the eye. Flavours are caught. Call it propensity, synchronicity, call it God, what you like: at the last fractional moment balances are tipped, this way and that. Interesting.’
‘You mean we ought to pray this one sticks,’ said Carl May derisively.
‘I do,’ said Dr Holly, and though neither of them prayed, little Alice stuck, and grew up, pretty little sister to four big brothers, alternately bullying and protective, resentful and admiring, lecherous and rejecting, mother’s little helper, sweeping, cooking, wiping, serving, flirting, sulking, weeping, giggling, absurdly tender-hearted or else cruel beyond belief, valued for the sheer femaleness of her being, brought up with an amiable father and four big brothers no real kin to her.
Alice entered a beauty contest when she was fifteen, was ‘discovered’, won a holiday in Florida, kept the company of long-legged beach girls with millionaire boyfriends, came back, went to charm school, discovered the value of disdain, the power of active nonpleasing, failing to placate; she looked at her perfect self in a mirror one day and decided not to have children, not to get married. Who could she ever find to love better than she? Who better to be faithful to, than herself? Men were useful as admirers: sex kept them quiet: love was for suckers: when she felt the first pangs of love, lust, she went home to Honeybell Lee, the dogs, the cats, the nieces and nephews, love, muddle and mess abounding, and was cured.
‘She’s not like the rest of us,’ said Honeybell Lee, puzzled. Honeybell Lee believed Alice to be her natural child: so far as she was aware the Bulstrode Clinic had carried out a simple investigation under local anaesthetic to change the acid/alkaline balance of her internal secretions in favour of the survival of sperm c
arrying female chromosomes when next it arrived. And it had worked to the great pleasure and satisfaction of all concerned.
And Alice would have been truly faithful to herself, if only fate had so allowed, and not pushed men into her bed, photographers and clients and so forth. Her infidelity brought her no pleasure. She really preferred to sleep alone, being of a nature that saw sex as a drain on her personal resources, not something that enriched them.
Jane, Julie, Gina and Alice.
18
So it was that the four clones, Jane, Julie, Gina and Alice, produced by the irritation of a single egg, were successfully implanted in waiting wombs. Beyond confirming that growth was normal and the infants were successfully born, Holly and May made no attempt to follow the fortunes of the children, or to do the personality studies that would, both agreed, be interesting, if only to make some contribution to the nature/nurture debate. But the complications of setting up such studies would be immense; their research would come under an ethical and legal scrutiny it could not for the time being afford; and it would, they told themselves, be difficult for the four little girls to live normal lives under scrutiny. Nor did they see any good reason to tell Joanna May herself what they had done. Joanna May, the calm, normal, healthy, beautiful and apparently well-balanced woman whom they had, out of love, respect and admiration so successfully reproduced, was still a woman, and therefore liable to extreme, hysterical and unhelpful reaction: she was a creature of the emotions, rather than reason. That was the female lot. And look at it this way: if the population of, say, Egypt increased by a million every nine months, why then, were four more Joannas dropped into the pool – rather than one each of a female Madge/Jeremy, Harold/Katie, Douglas/Annette, Honeybell/Patrick (unlikely in any case to come into existence because of nature’s own inefficiency) – to be in any way abhorred? Holly and May had done no harm to anyone, so far as they could see, or anything: though Holly sometimes, when reviewing the past, did wonder a little about Carl May’s motives: could a man brought up in a kennel, barking in his heart, baying at the moon, really ever know himself? Did anyone?
