by Weldon, Fay
The two grey cats slept next to each other on one or other of the children’s beds, and Julie thought they ought to be in the kitchen.
‘No,’ said Gina, ‘they need all the comfort they can get. Everyone does.’ She missed Cliff; of course she did. Perhaps he’d change. If she went back now it might be different.
‘No, it won’t,’ said Julie. ‘You’re just addicted, that’s all. You’ve got pain and pleasure mixed.’
Little Anthony turned up the thermostat on the fish tank and one of the angelfish died. Julie slapped: the vet wouldn’t like it one bit.
‘Don’t do that,’ said Gina.
‘What those children need is discipline,’ said Julie.
‘Don’t you use that word to me,’ said Gina. ‘It was Cliff’s favourite word. When are we going to see Dr Holly? We can’t keep putting it off. It’s getting on our nerves.’
And Ben said, ‘Look Mum, look Auntie Julie, there’s a man working on the gas main outside and there isn’t gas down this street, only electricity.’
Ben had just started at a new school. They were hopeless at football which meant he was the best and to be the best player in a losing team is easier than being the worst player in a winning one.
Ben said, ‘He has a notebook and he writes things in it.’
Julie said, ‘By the pricking of my thumbs, Something evil this way comes. There’s more going on than meets the eye. We’ll go to Dr Holly tomorrow. Ben, you’ll have to stay off school and look after the little ones.’
‘Oh, sh—’ Ben began to say, and then, out of deference to his twin Aunt Julie, whom he had begun to quite like – he admired her toughness – ‘Oh botheration. I don’t want to miss too much school. I want to be a doctor. Or perhaps a vet.’ He would be quite happy here if it wasn’t for Sue, who kept getting on his nerves, so he’d start hitting her. He didn’t want to, but he was sure she wet the bed on purpose, just to put everyone to trouble.
44
Jane, Julie, Gina and Alice.
Jane went home and announced: ‘I’ve lost my job and I’ve lost my boyfriend and it looks as if I’m going to lose my home. That’s the good news. The bad news is I’ve found a twin. Which means, Madge, either I’m adopted or you had twins and gave one away. I need to know which.’
They were having Friday supper. Jeremy had met Jane off the train, and been late. She’d had to stand about waiting for him in the outfall from Chernobyl for a full twenty minutes. The waiting room had been too full of cigarette smokers to afford acceptable shelter. When her father did arrive, she scarcely recognized him. She was used to a tall, albeit gangling, man. This one seemed shrivelled and shrunk, old. She didn’t like it at all. She liked it even less when he said, ‘I’m sorry I’m late. We have little Tobias staying. Not so little, of course. He’s thirteen.’
‘Who in God’s name is Tobias?’
‘Laura’s little boy,’ said Jeremy. ‘He’s over from Toronto to stay with us. I’m sorry, he’s in your old room. We didn’t know you’d be visiting. You so seldom do.’
‘What a Godawful name,’ said Jane. ‘Tobias!’ She had learned the power of bad temper from Alice, and the value of non-smiling. She practised them assiduously.
‘He always was called Tobias,’ said her father serenely, ‘but you weren’t listening.’
‘I was too busy trying to pass my exams,’ said Jane. ‘Well, it’s a wise child knows its own father.’
But her father did not rise to the bait. She found Madge shuffling round the kitchen, wearing slippers. Madge had a bunion, Madge said. The glass in her pebble lenses was thicker than ever, but not so thick that Jane couldn’t see love for Tobias shining out from behind them. How could she! Madge’s eyes had always shone with emotions that shouldn’t be there: good emotion, noble emotion, masochism triumphant. They streamed out from her in a bright trail of kindly confusion. Now Madge loved Tobias, her rival’s child, because he was there, because he was her husband’s, because she should. How could she be like this and still teach grown people? Didn’t she understand the value of the negative emotions? Have I, Jane, ever understood them, come to that? Would she ever let me? It was my mother made me what I am, and what I am is what I’m not. So thought Jane, as she looked for forks clean enough to lay the table with.
It was the better to annoy and upset, no doubt, that Jane kept her announcement until Jeremy, Madge, Tobias and herself were sitting round the table eating shepherd’s pie – a typical English dish, Jane explained to Tobias, who was a beastly clear-skinned, thick-skinned Canadian lad, very plain, with his father’s shortsighted eyes (no doubt there, alas). By a typical English dish, Jane implied, though did not say, she meant improperly cooked, fatty, stringy, English mince, hopelessly old-fashioned, unhealthy, and awful: even Canada could do better: sometimes Jane felt Madge did it on purpose to persecute Jeremy. After the mince she went on to her parentage.
‘Well,’ said Madge, ‘I’m glad you’ve raised the matter but I hardly think this is the time.’
‘Why not?’ asked Jane.
‘We don’t want to upset the child,’ said Madge.
‘Either he’s my brother or he’s not,’ said Jane. ‘And he doesn’t look like it to me. My belief is I’m adopted. Do I look like either of you two? No I do not.’
‘You’re upset,’ observed Jeremy. ‘You’ll get indigestion.’
‘If I’m upset it’s Madge’s cooking,’ said Jane. ‘Tough old shepherds, these, Tobias. Tough and greasy. A great mistake to cook them, if you ask me.’ Her parents were shocked into silence. Jane felt terrible and began to cry. There was a kind of noise in her ears, as of breaking glass.
‘Dear, dear, dear,’ said Madge, ‘it’s as if she was six again.’
‘She was like this at fifteen,’ said Jeremy.
‘But worse at six,’ said Madge. And Jane had always had a vision of herself as a placid, easy, perfectly well-behaved child!
Madge made Jane go to bed in the spare room with a hot water bottle and sat on the edge of the bed, spare leg flesh swelling over the tops of her slippers, wispy hair awry – shouldn’t she have hormone treatment, thought Jane, but she wouldn’t, would she: she’d say she didn’t want to interfere with nature; what she herself would have said, as little as a week ago, come to think of it. Since she’d met Alice she’d become a great deal less pious, but also a great deal more critical and, she began to see, really rather nasty. Alice had lent her a photographer for a bed companion and she’d found him so boring she’d asked him to go and buy a bottle of wine and then locked the door and pretended to be out when he came charging up the stairs again. She enjoyed that far more than she would the night in bed with him.
Madge said, ‘Well, dear, to tell you the truth you’re not quite adopted: I most certainly gave birth to you: your father isn’t Jeremy: you weren’t quite a test-tube baby: it wasn’t quite artificial insemination by donor…’
‘Stop it, stop it,’ shrieked Jane. ‘This is disgusting.’
‘I don’t think it’s nearly as disgusting as sex,’ said Madge.
‘You always told me sex was wonderful,’ said Jane.
‘A child should think that,’ said Madge. ‘Just because it never went right for me didn’t mean it would be the same for you.’
Jane opened and shut her mouth like a goldfish in a bowl hoping for sustenance, reassurance, information, nourishment, anything.
‘So I must tell you that although Jeremy isn’t technically your father – I was told he was a Harley Street surgeon – he really is your father in essence. What was it Brecht said in Mother Courage? “The child belongs to the one who looks after it.”’
‘Brecht is a man,’ said Jane.
‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it,’ said Madge, a little peevishly, Jane thought, in the circumstances. Surely she, Jane, was central to this drama. All the emotions should be hers.
‘You mean you’ve never had sex with my father?’ said Jane.
‘No,’ said Madge,
‘and he isn’t your father. It’s all a long time ago and I think the best thing to do is go and see the Dr Holly who helped us to achieve you. He made a very good impression. I imagine that what’s happened is that you and this other young woman share the same father. They may have used the same semen more than once.’
‘Taken semen from the same batch, you mean,’ said Jane.
‘Well of course,’ said Madge.
Jane was sick in the washhandbasin: she could not even get into the bathroom; Tobias was having a bath. The rest of the weekend went well enough. She got used to her father looking so old and her mother looking so soppy. She thought perhaps Brecht was right. These were the ones who had looked after her: these were her parents. She felt quite pleased, however, not to have to repress those qualities in herself she had always disliked in her father – the apathy, the sitting about, the slow movements, the grunts as his mind worked, as if some infinitely complicated inner machinery ground incessantly on. She could take of him what she wanted, and simply leave the rest. And the same went for her mother. She need take only what she fancied. She had been so amply served with a helping, she could well afford to be fussy.
She even took down Tobias’s address in Canada and promised to write to him. But she didn’t ask after his mother. She wouldn’t go that far.
45
Jane, Julie, Gina and Alice.
At 10.30 a.m. on the third Tuesday in May, Jane and Alice sat in Dr Holly’s outer office, by appointment, and waited for Dr Holly to return from, or so his secretary said, an important meeting. They sat as far from one another as they could. Just because they were sisters or half-sisters, they did not see why they should like one another, let alone resemble one another: in fact, the more they thought about it, the less they felt they did either. For the occasion Jane wore a tweed skirt and jacket; Alice wore jeans and a pink sweatshirt. Jane’s hair was now cut remarkably short; Alice’s was pulled back from her yet higher forehead by a sweatband but cascaded down her back. They came in separate cars. When Dr Holly’s secretary Sarah said, ‘Identical twins?’ and neither replied, she said, ‘You both turn your heads at the same time at the same angle. It’s quite funny really.’
She went back to her word processor and Jane tapped with her fingers on the side of the chair until she noticed Alice was doing the same, so she stopped.
‘Have you come in for the study?’ asked Sarah. ‘Is that what you want to see him about? Because they’re not starting till next month. He is very busy.’
Neither replied.
‘Oh well,’ said Sarah, ‘no skin off my nose. It may not even get off the ground, I warn you. I get these letters from the Biomedical Ethics people. He leaves me to answer them. Never a dull moment.’
Alice and Jane stared into space; four pure-blue eyes staring at nothing, giving nothing away if they could help it. Jane had lost some weight since she had discovered her twin, confronted her mother, and gone, as Tom put it, finally barmy. He kept out of the way. Alice had put on a little, since she’d begun losing so much work, and slept alone.
‘Most of the twins are babes in arms,’ said Sarah, filling in the reproachful silence. ‘Lots more twins being born these days. Mothers have their babies later, when twinning’s more likely; and they’re healthier, so they carry both babies to term. One used to just get lost, before the mothers even knew. We get triplets and quads quite often, and nothing to do with fertility drugs. So it’s not as if you two are a rarity. They might not even take you on.’
The blue eyes turned slowly towards her.
‘At least it’s just brain cells, these days. He’s stopped doing all that egg-cell stuff: he got frightened. I wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t have my eggs taken away in the cause of science, no matter how much money they paid. I don’t want to even have eggs, it makes me feel like a hen. I’d rather not know about them.’
She thought she’d better shut up and get on with the mail. She was being disloyal to her employer. She had hoped for a decent conversation but seldom got it. Perhaps there was something wrong with her. People didn’t like her. She did say sharp things, she supposed. She couldn’t help it. She wished she could: was there a pill which would make you likeable? If not, no doubt Martins was working on it. Would she take it if there was? Probably.
Two more of them came down the corridor: the eleven o’clock appointments, no doubt. Sarah could see them through the glass door. She worked out the number of eyes that were now going to stare at her in disbelief, dislike and reproach: eight. These two did seem jollier, however, than the two already in the room. Both wore pink sweaters and jeans. She was glad to see they were at least not quite the same height. Too much similarity gave her the creeps. Reared separately, no doubt, though they’d end up much the same in the end. The impact of the rearing environment wore away with time. In old age genes triumphed. Mind you, all old people seemed pretty much the same to her: as did small babies. People started out true to the broad human type, and ended the same way. Variation peaked in the child-bearing years.
‘Oh, quads,’ said Sarah, when the next two came in. ‘That is a bit more interesting. But why didn’t you all come in together? I’ll see if Dr Holly can be brought out of his meeting.’
‘You do just that,’ said Gina, mother of three, accustomed to telling others what to do for their own good. ‘And fast. We have a right to some kind of explanation.’
Like so many who have dealings with a beneficent but controlling state, she had a clearer view of her rights than many another, and was quicker to voice them. The others seemed stunned into silence. Not just two, but four. So far.
46
Gerald called Hamish Tovey of NBI – News Broadcast International – and said, ‘The public are getting hysterical. They won’t go out in the rain: they won’t have picnics; I went to the lido with my wife and there was almost no one there, just us and a couple of friends. The farmers are complaining; the horticulturists are complaining; the fashion trade’s complaining; and the Electric Power Authority are having kittens because the future of nuclear power is in jeopardy. Not only that, the vets are complaining of litters having two heads; I’m even getting tales of budgerigars exploding.’
‘Budgerigars can explode if you feed them the wrong grain,’ said the NBI man. ‘We’ve just done a feature on it, nothing to do with Chernobyl.’
‘Tell that to the public,’ said Gerald, bitterly.
‘That’s what we are doing,’ the NBI man pointed out, ‘as best we can. But the public can’t tell a roentgen from a rad, and to tell you the truth neither can anyone at NBI. If you could put some of your experts at our disposal to help our graphics team out, I’d be grateful. We’ve a world opportunity here and it’s going to waste. It’s sickening.’
Gerald said he thought Britnuc had some spare experts in the divinatory area, tested and proven in the field, and Hamish Tovey seemed as interested and grateful as a TV newsman can get: that is to say, he said, ‘There just might be an interesting wind-up item there, I suppose. A light closing laugh. I could look into it. Now what can I do for you?’
Gerald said his Department could see the value of some kind of prize-winning news feature, fronted by someone from the commercial rather than the governmental sector – inasmuch as official announcements had lost credibility in this particular area. A popular yet authoritative figure, if such a person existed.
‘Carl May?’ suggested Hamish Tovey.
‘Brilliant idea!’ said Gerald Coustain.
‘Did you see him drink that glass of milk on TV?’ said Hamish Tovey, suddenly animated, ‘defying the roentgens! Brilliant PR! How’s he been since?’
‘Fit as a fiddle, top of the world,’ said Gerald. ‘Perhaps we could get him to do something just as dramatic.’
‘Or even more so,’ said Hamish.
‘So long as it’s safe,’ said Gerald. ‘We don’t want to lose him!’
‘So long as the roentgens and the rads are as harmless as you lot make out,’ said Hamish
Tovey. ‘I have my crew to think about, not to mention the union.’
‘Back in 1957,’ said Gerald, ‘when Windscale caught fire and the instrumentation failed – twice round the clock and back again and no one noticed – the duty engineer lifted the lid of the pile to see what was going on. He stared right into the burning heart of the dragon. He’s still alive to tell the tale. Head of the Nuclear Safety Inspectorate, as it happens.’
‘Is that so!’ said Hamish Tovey. ‘Now that would be really something by way of a visual fix. Radiation’s something we’re all going to have to learn to live with, I guess.’
‘I guess so,’ said Gerald Coustain.
‘Do you think Carl May would do it?’ asked Hamish, wistful and dependent all of a sudden, like a greedy child lusting after a cream cake it knows its mother’s purse can’t afford.
‘You can only ask him,’ said Gerald. ‘I have his personal number here, as it happens. He’s not averse to publicity, of the right kind. If you took his astrologers and tea-leafers off his hands, he’d certainly feel obliged. I think his board aren’t too happy about them.’
‘I’ll have to ask the boss about that,’ said Hamish Tovey.
‘I didn’t know you had one,’ said Gerald.
‘When it suits me,’ said Hamish.
‘Mind you, these old Magnox stations of Britnuc’s aren’t the same as Windscale, or Sellafield as we call it now,’ said Gerald, ‘but I suppose they could raise a fuel rod from the pile and Mr May could clasp it to his bosom. How would that do? Or he could jump into the cooling ponds with his young companion: something like that might not go amiss.’
‘Oh yes, the young companion,’ said Hamish Tovey. ‘I filmed her jumping into a trout pond with someone or other, once. Quite a looker. Amazing eyes. Now that’s really interesting. It would have to be a zoom lens of course, this time. I don’t see my crew with an underwater camera in a cooling pond.’
