Tessa had railed straight back, told him he was a funny kind of scientist if he didn’t even believe in his own science. Then she had gone off and immediately found out what it did involve. She had written away for leaflets, brochures, scoured the press and specialist magazines. She had learned about cervical mucus defects and endometriosis. She had discovered that the first could be overcome by sperm being placed directly into the uterus or with in vitro fertilisation, which could also overcome the second. She had imagined a fine hollow needle guided by ultrasound finding its way through her insides, harvesting eggs like some skilled truffle digger. She had imagined the eggs making their way into an incubator then out again to be mixed with sperm. She had considered first Stephen’s sperm, then that of an unknown donor in the little dish.
She had rather liked the idea of an unknown - some young, unruffled medical student earning his fifteen pounds a throw. So as not to have to bother Stephen with it, of course. Stephen, she secretly thought, was probably against the whole idea because he couldn’t face doing it into a dish, let alone doing it. She had imagined sperm and egg meeting in the dish, making a love match, then the slender tube containing the embryo slipping its way into her womb. And then she had stopped imagining.
After that, after the interventions of medical science, the real magic began.
She had left some of the leaflets and brochures lying around for Stephen. Her response to the articles he had left for her. She had specially selected the ones with statistics and graphs in bright primary colours showing that the success rate of IVF was around 12%. Given that the average monthly chance of conception for an ordinarily fertile couple was only 20-25%, this was hardly terrible.
But Stephen had never commented, had pretended not to notice, had perhaps not noticed. She had gotten angry then, had escalated what she had begun to call in her own mind, the battle of the articles. Right in the centre of his desk, she had placed a piece about the decline in quality and quantity of human sperm from average levels of about one hundred million sperm per millilitre of semen in the 1970’s to about forty-eight million now. Not only that, but a much higher concentration of the sperm had lower motility, lacked tails or had two heads, were as misshapen as those of endangered species.
When Stephen didn’t respond, she had goaded him with more articles on the same theme, panicking features describing the disastrous effects on sperm of pollutants, of clingfilm, of heat, of oestrogen remains from contraceptive pills in drinking water. At last he had met her provocation. He had placed two tedious, carefully photocopied essays on her desk. At first glance, they seemed to have nothing to do with the subject at hand. One dealt with statistical noise and showed how similar experiments could be used to provide wholly different statistics, depending on the model used. The second was a more general piece about millenarian anxieties, the growth in end-of-the-world scenarios as the year 2000 approached. A footnote cited Anglo-Danish studies in sperm decline as an instance of this anxiety.
The articles arrived with a box of chocolates. Insult piled on injury, Tessa thought. As if chocolates might put her fears and longing to rest. After that, there was silence. Maybe Stephen’s mind and other vital parts were already in Paris.
Abruptly, Tessa got up and dropped some coins on the café table. She would go to Stephen now, straight away, find out the truth without all this duplicitous spying, scream her anger which was suddenly as vibrant as the hissing tongue of a snake. She would make an end of it then and there. He would probably be relieved.
As she crossed the street, the door of the house opened again. Tessa paused. A child’s buggy appeared, closely followed by a svelte dark woman and a toddler in a sweater of many colours. Tessa’s heart skipped a beat. Could this be Stephen’s Simone? Somehow she hadn’t considered the possibility of a child. His child? Her palms felt clammy. That would explain everything, explain why Stephen wouldn’t even try, why he had rejected the fertility clinics, turned a deaf ear to her recent talk of adoption.
Her fury evaporated as quickly as it had come, leaving only a dense sludge behind it, thick with the odour of her own failure.
A large black and yellow ball rolled towards Tessa’s feet. She stooped to pick it up and found the toddler lurching against her. His face beneath the mop of sandy hair was gleeful with naughtiness. Could she see Stephen in it? She put out a hand to help him regain his balance and held soft, pudgy fingers. A desire to embrace him gripped her. She wanted that warm powdery smell close to her.
‘Jacob!’ Tessa heard the woman’s voice and leapt away.
‘Dis merci à la dame, Jacob.’ The woman who could be Simone was right behind the child. She gave Tessa a hint of a smile and strapped the boy emphatically into the buggy. Meanwhile Jacob made a sound vaguely akin to a thank-you.
Tessa’s lips strained into a curl. The woman was pretty, all high colour and fine bones. She tried to imagine Stephen with her, but her imagination wasn’t good enough. Her mouth opened of its own will as if it were about to speak something she would later regret. Tessa closed it, nodded, darted away. She stopped herself from running, but she walked quickly in the opposite direction and hailed a taxi. She didn’t have the strength for the streets.
Inside, before she could change her mind, she leafed through her address book and said, ‘Rue des Beaux Arts, s’il vous plaît.’
The hotel was tucked away on a small street just south of the river. One had to look hard for any identifying sign, as if it wanted to hide its function from passers-by. But inside it was far grander than Tessa had expected, all polished wood and brass and a tiny library into which she walked thinking it might contain a reception desk. When she came out again, she found herself at the base of an utterly circular staircase, like some great hollow column surrounded by a frieze. She carried on, discovered a small bar and then a restaurant with a wondrous geometrically moulded ceiling. From its far end came the soft tinkle of water plashing into a fountain.
It was not at all what she would have expected of Stephen. And then she thought again and decided that perhaps she had misjudged him and this place was like the him she had never managed to follow - like walking into a microscope replete with hidden, invisible life. The thought excited her, dispelled her gloom.
A waiter appeared from behind a door, guided her back to a reception room she had somehow missed by going into the library. An elegant young woman sat behind the desk.
Tessa decided against French. ‘I’m looking for Dr. Stephen Caldwell. Is he in by any chance? Otherwise I’ll leave a message.’
The woman passed a manicured nail down the register. ‘No one is here by that name, Madame.’ She looked up at Tessa expectantly.
‘But he always stays here.’ Tessa felt her voice rise, too shrill. ‘I mean, he told me he was staying here.’ She lowered her pitch. ‘At least I think he did.’
The woman turned the register towards her so that she could look for herself.
‘I shall check the advance bookings. Perhaps he has not arrived yet.’
‘No. No, that won’t be necessary.’
Tessa turned away. Stupid tears stung at her eyes. In the street, she hid them behind sun-glasses. If she had wanted proof, she told herself, she now had it. Stephen wasn’t where he was meant to be, where she had assumed he would be. Hadn’t he once told her he always stayed in the Rue des Beaux Arts? How long ago was that? It was a concrete measure of how far apart they had grown that she had no idea where he stopped while in Paris.
And if Stephen wasn’t where he was meant to be, it almost certainly followed that he wasn’t who he was meant to be. Now that she thought about it, it wasn’t only that Stephen found talking about personal matters difficult, he was downright secretive. She had read of men with double lives - lives which ran on parallel courses and never met, separate wives, separate families, separate identities.
Tessa walked blindly in she didn’t know what direction, stumbled upon a cinema, went in and watched a film play itself out in her mind which had n
othing to do with the one on the screen. At some point in its unfolding of tawdry adultery, secret lives and B-movie melodrama, she told herself in a bitter little voice that she really ought to have found a less hackneyed script. But who was to help her with that?
The Maison de la Chimie was at the end of the Rue St Dominique, a narrow street of tri-colour flags and policeman’s glass cubicles and self-important government buildings. It had its own stately courtyard, but no flag or uniformed guard, though it did sport a large board announcing the ‘Congrès de la Nouvelle Génétique’.
Keeping her eyes down, Tessa made her way through clusters of people up to the indicated first floor and slipped into the back of a large, well-appointed auditorium. She had timed her entrance precisely. If the schedule was being kept to, Stephen should be some ten minutes into his presentation, his attention rivetted on his text.
The lights were dimmed and on the distant screen there rose one of those globular structures which meant as little to her as a Martian calculus. Over the microphone, a voice was speaking French. They were running late, Tessa thought and considered going out again, then spotting a seat at the end of a row, decided against it. She sat down just as the lights went up.
When she looked at the stage, she saw a man standing casually to one side of an oak lectern. She blinked, tried to refocus eyes that seemed to be failing her. The man was definitely Stephen, though on the platform he looked taller, far more prepossessing than he did across the breakfast table. It was the voice that had deceived her, a certain, unstammering voice, well-modulated, a voice she barely remembered from their early days together and speaking a language she had no idea Stephen had so firm a grasp of.
The toll of deceptions her husband was capable of seemed to mount exponentially with each passing moment, Tessa reflected. But, of course, it all made sense. He had to speak something to this Simone - and didn’t they say that the only way to learn a language properly was in bed? She searched the room, tried unsuccessfully to detect the woman she had seen on the street. Tried to find another likely candidate for Stephen’s Simone, though she hadn’t a clue to a possible appearance.
With a grimace, she gave up and forced herself to try and follow Stephen’s words, but the double barrier of language and knowledge made her dizzy. She comforted herself with the thought that at least he was here and soon she would confront him. But all she could really think of was that the man standing there at the front of this large and evidently respectful gathering, this man who had been her husband for nigh on to ten years, was a stranger.
She waited for an opportune moment when Stephen was looking down at his notes and stole from the room. Not that she really imagined he would spot her. At the best of times, he hardly looked at her, and here, in this unexpected context, she would probably have to walk straight up to him and pronounce her name before recognition took place. Tit for tat, Tessa told herself, with a touch of what had once been customary wryness. One stranger deserved another.
The lounge area next to the auditorium was deserted, the bar closed. Tessa perched on a window seat and looked desultorily into the courtyard, then at her watch. With luck, the two of them might walk out together and at least she would have the pleasure of causing Stephen a momentary embarrassment.
On the seat beside her, she spotted some glossy brochures. She picked up a few and flicked. They were multi-lingual, English - no, American perhaps, French, German and advertised the present and future wonders of biotechnology.
In no particular order, she read about strange genetic crossovers - pigs that were goats, potatoes that contained pea genes, rape that was also radish. She read about human organ factories which could supply new synthetic ‘replacement parts’ for defective ones, protein drug treatments to break up blood clots, a gene to combat cystic fibrosis. As she read, she didn’t know whether she wanted to applaud or to cry. It wasn’t that she had strong feelings about natural purity. Nothing was pure, after all. In time, everything got chopped and changed. Even the English were way back part French. And her garden was filled with hybrids. On the other hand, pigs and goats, laboratory created animals, genetic tamperings. With a shiver, Tessa realised that one way or another this was what her husband - that same husband who wouldn’t consider an assisted birth - was involved in. She shrugged this aside, imagined a new millenium peopled by strange creatures out of a Bosch inferno, twisted the kaleidoscope and saw children so much more perfect than their parents that they turned on parental imperfections in a rush to stamp them out. She suddenly felt tired, spent, as if the confrontations of the day, the child and then this different Stephen, had robbed her altogether of purpose.
‘Hello, Bonjour, Guten Tag, Bongiorno.’ A gusty voice startled her from her doom-laden reverie.
She looked up to see a tall lean man with spiky white hair above a startlingly youthful, bronzed face. Bright mischievous eyes grinned down at her.
‘Hello,’ she murmured.
‘Phew, that’s a relief. For a moment I thought you might be Finnish, which would put a rapid end to my repartee. Not Finnish, then, but bored?’ He raised a shaggy inquiring eyebrow.
‘And you?’ Tessa was cautious.
‘Not bored. Never bored. It’s just that I already know Stephen Caldwell’s work pretty well. So I thought I could skip question time. And you looked more interesting.’ He gave her that grin again. ‘I saw you walking out.’
‘You’re American.’
‘Is that a crime?’
Tessa was surprised to hear herself laughing. ‘No. Possibly a misdemeanour.’
‘That’s honest.’
‘I’m not. Honest, I mean. Only sometimes.’
‘Well that might make a refreshing change.’ He eyed her with the kind of overt relish she no longer thought she was capable of eliciting. ‘Speaking of which, I could use some coffee. There’s one of those French things they call cafés just a block away. Could I induce you to join me?’
‘You could,’ she said, but didn’t move for a moment.
‘Well then, what are we waiting for?’
Tessa hesitated.
‘It’s your teatime, isn’t it? You could have tea.’
‘You might tell me your name.’
‘Easy. Ted. Ted Knight, as of the ones on horseback. Though I always leave mine back at the ranch,’ he chuckled, surveyed her as she rose. ‘And you’re… no don’t tell me, Lauren, as in slim Bacall, she of the glossy hair and martini dry wit.’
‘Hardly,’ Tessa murmured, though she liked the image, liked even more the sense of being swept up by a whirlwind of energy when she felt sapped of her own. And now that she saw people beginning to stream out of the conference room, it came to her that confronting Stephen here in front of colleagues, in front of this attractive man, was not something she was capable of. Then too, this Ted Knight might be able to tell her things. Ted Knight. The name meant something to her though she couldn’t quite place it.
‘So? Are you going to tell me?’
‘Tessa. Tessa Hughes.’
He paused for a moment. Reflected. ‘Like it.’ He stretched out his hand, clasped hers firmly.
In the café on the corner of the Rue Bourgogne, they sat on red plush and ate strawberry tarts.
‘You’re a scientist?’ Tessa asked as she watched him tuck in greedily.
‘No. Not really. Studied it. Even worked in a lab once.’ He shrugged. ‘But I’m unhampered by patience, so I didn’t fit the bill.’
‘Yes, I can see that.’
‘Can you? I hope you don’t mind, ‘cause I think I’m going to like you.’
Tessa felt warmth rising up her neck. ‘So what do you do?’
‘That’s not a very English question. Too direct.’
‘We’re not in England.’
‘Right.’ He considered her for a moment, then bent forward conspiratorially. ‘I’m a headhunter.’
‘Sounds nasty. Do you take the bodies along as well?’
‘Usually.’ He chortled, looke
d at her like that again so that she realised what she had intimated.
‘And what do you hunt?’
‘Geneticists, molecular biologists, technologists. You perhaps…’
She deflected him. ‘And is France one of your preferred hunting grounds?’
‘France is good.’ His expression grew more serious. ‘Lots of talent. And they love the adventure of the new. They embrace it. But on the whole, they prefer to stay in France. Can’t say I blame them.’ He waved a hand round effusively. ‘And life apart, the government is pretty good to them. Nor are the investors half bad. Now the British, that’s a different story. Riven by ambivalence. They can never make up their minds whether they’d prefer to go back to leeches, thatched cottages and morally sound hot water bottles or leap into the 21st century.’
He looked at her to see if she was offended by his words.
‘If you mean, do I want my pigs to be half goat, then I don’t. And I’m rather partial to hot-water bottles. You can’t snuggle up to a radiator. On the other hand…’
He caught her tone, crinkled his nose at her, rushed on. ‘Wasn’t always like that, needless to say. A lost time ago, technology used to be a God for you English, a veritable good. Now the country is hardly kind to its scientists, gives them little respect, less money. Yet you somehow manage to produce these brilliant guys and gals - unhampered by impatience…’ He shook his leonine head in evident perplexity. ‘Like this Stephen Caldwell we just walked out on.’
Tessa all but choked on a strawberry. Now was the time to say it. Yet the words wouldn’t form themselves on her lips and he carried on.
‘And he knows how to go into hiding too.’
‘Go into hiding?’
‘Yeah. You know, doesn’t answer his post, the telephone, even e-mail. I haven’t touched base with him for ages until this week.’
The Things We Do For Love Page 4
