by Fay Weldon
I do try to forget. All I know about her is that she was born on Monday 26th March at 3.15 a.m. At least I can do her horoscope and work out what she is likely to be doing. I think she is probably a model like me, though being a sun in Aries will be taller than me, Jupiter being so well aspected in her chart. And the quasi Apollo who fathered her and disappeared on the tour bus was handsome enough, God knows, he being the one with the dirty toes. I daresay this is why I put so much trust in astrology: it’s not exactly a personality defect so much as a means of spiritual survival.
But then of course for all I know she may be dead by now: sixty-seven years since she was born. She might not even have survived infancy. They snatched her from my breast before I had finished feeding her. Her new parents had a train to catch. The one nice nun in the place told me not to worry, the parents had seemed perfectly pleasant and respectable and had been given a bottle of expressed breast milk to take home with them.
‘Whose milk?’ I’d asked, startled. I’ve not forgotten that.
‘No idea,’ she’d replied. ‘We pool it.’
Perhaps some of it came from Tess, I’ve always hoped so. Some of the other girls had quite nasty diseases. Tess was perfectly healthy, a lovely, rosy, happy girl, and made so much milk I envied her. She dripped it all over the place. And then she went and hanged herself. Drip, drip.
Last-Minute Panic
Well, forget all that. That was then, this is now, or at least further on in history. I write this in my eighty-fourth year, looking back from 2023, and these being the days of the morning-after pill you can reasonably replace the world ‘fallen’ with the words ‘thoroughly stupid’. That’s the Millennials’ view for you, and we can see it as progress.
But back, or forward, whichever you like (you’re the reader, you choose) to 1995. What with one thing and another and Xandra found herself nearing forty with a baby in her head but not in the real world – and she began to worry. She had a charming, civilised, well-run household. She was a nurse, after all, and had pretty soon learned to keep things neat, clean and ship-shape. Gwinny hadn’t been much help in this respect, tending to go for artistic chaos, the sort who lets the dishes pile up in the sink while thinking of higher things. Xandra even had a room initially reserved for a nursery, and still referred to as that, even though Clive now used it as somewhere peaceful to write, set up as an office with its own TV – albeit an old 26-inch Toshiba CF26C30 – and if Clive could be eased out of it was all ready and waiting for the baby. Finding space for the baby was the first thing Xandra had done when they moved in. Could it really be all that time ago?
Xandra could see she could no longer leave it to chance. Clive grumbled, but moved his office and TV to the new conservatory extension (Gwinny paid).
Xandra repainted the nursery in Dulux White Delicious, pink but not noticeably so. As fashions in baby wallpaper changed over a decade from pastel sweet to rich red to purple power – even once to black – she had kept up. She liked to decorate every two years.
Clive really liked the black – he was certain the baby (what baby?) would be a boy. ‘None of your girly floral nonsense,’ he’d say. Xandra, who would much prefer a girl, had stayed dumb.
Possess the image, possess the reality: sympathetic magic. Xandra hung a mobile featuring pretty little ducklings from the ceiling. Then she bought a cot. But still it didn’t happen. And before she knew it, Xandra’s time clock was now ticking ‘now or never, now or never’. Everything was in place: her career was well settled and there was a job waiting for her when she went back to it, in about a month, perhaps. She’d forgotten any qualms about the morality of bringing a baby into an overcrowded world, and by 1996 had even lost faith in the efficacy of white magic. Still no baby. And she wanted one.
‘Forget about over-population, the civil war in Afghanistan, the new one in Chechnya,’ she urged Clive. ‘The world needs babies like ours. What about me, me, me? And what about us?’ she added prudently.
‘You could always think about adoption,’ I said. ‘It’s a morally sound choice. Help a child who already exists.’ Clive rose to the bait at once.
‘Adoption!’ he cried. Never in a month of Sundays. You never know what you might get!’
‘Oh Gwinny, how little you know me! I want Clive’s baby, not any old baby. I love my husband. Clive’s baby. There has to be something created between us to honour that love. Clive, loving each other the way we do, there must be a baby, half me, half you! I want us to go on into the future.’
Now Clive was busily engaged learning Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner by heart and I think it was only coincidence that he quoted imperfectly ‘Instead of a cross an albatross about my neck was hung’, before leaning forward and taking Xandra’s hand and saying, ‘Half me, half you? What a lovely idea. And so it shall be.’
Actually I do know Xandra fairly well, if only because the walls between Nos. 23 and 24 are so thin one might as well be living with her. I knew the Smithsons’ ups and their downs, their ins and their outs, as it were, and I can make a pretty good guess at what was going on in Xandra’s mind and have no qualms about reporting it. Though as they say on the news websites ‘These thoughts and opinions do not necessarily coincide with those of the broadcaster’, that is to say me, now in omniscient narrator mode. The Writers’ Huddle – the Kentish Town group of aspirant novelists I meet with once a week since I started writing this story – some are even published – says this is okay. I was rather hurt, I must say, when Xandra said, ‘How little you know me!’ It’s the other way round.
Having It All
This, Xandra was thinking, was NHS Britain, not some dark savage place far away, and she Xandra was entitled to a year’s maternity leave even though she didn’t intend to take it. With her savings they could manage quite easily until she got back to work, which would be within the month, and Clive was at home a lot; she could probably persuade him to do the house-husbanding so there wouldn’t be child care to pay. Clive would like that, and the trendy mummies at the school gate would adore him and he would be happy adoring them back – in a theoretical way, of course; Clive loved her and would never betray her – and there was always Gwinny to help, she was as good as a spare grandmother, so wasn’t it not just their right but a positive duty to have a baby who would save the world, rather than the multitude who could only add to its burdens? Couldn’t they just concentrate on actually having a baby?
And Clive, surprisingly, said yes. He was happy enough to concentrate. Xandra had never worked in a maternity ward – she was an Intensive Care specialist – but had access to all relevant material. Clive had his friends in the Soho theatrical pub where he occasionally had a drink or two. I kept out of it. I found myself more prudish than the Smithsons, coming as I did from an earlier generation. My father would not have believed his ears.
The missionary position if you want a girl, doggy if you don’t (Clive wanted a boy, Xandra a girl; they took turns; no more anal sex, unless they weakened). No tight underpants for Clive, no coffee, no more smoking, rationed alcohol for both of them, as much sex as possible, forget fertility watch; it only made couples anxious and spoils the pleasure.
And sex was a truly masterly performance on Clive’s part. Gwinny heard it nightly. The wall between the two adjacent bedrooms was thin. But it had seemed to Gwinny that it did occasionally conclude in an inappropriate place if what you were after was a baby. More particularly it seemed to Gwinny that this happened in the few days when Xandra was at her most fertile. Perhaps Clive confused safe days with risky days. Or perhaps one or other of them were not quite as keen on swelling their family as they pretended? They certainly lusted after one another, but love? And what was the difference between love and lust anyway?
Clive had this albatross (unconscious guilt, presumably) hanging round his neck – what was this all about? Xandra certainly had a rock (caution, and a need for practicality) weighing her down. He acted before he thought, she thought before she acted. He was
certainly the more fun. But when both spoke of ‘love’, were they talking about remotely the same thing?
Gwinny still owned one of those little Catholic birth control monitors (left over from her previous life) that told you which days of your cycle were safe and which were not, though for her it lacked any practical purpose. She kept it, she supposed, for sentimental reasons, in the same way women keep their wedding dress long after they can fit into it. Such monitors were far from fail-safe, as Gwinny knew to her cost. Reliance on it, when once she had, resulted in an abortion. Aristotle thought that ensoulment – when the soul enters into the body – didn’t happen for some three months, but she’d left it too late and it had to be done at four months when the foetus had quickened; which was when, come to think of it, she’d got interested in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Bardo Thodol. The Buddhists allowed a cap or IUD as a barrier to prevent the sperm getting to the egg, but once conception had occurred they wouldn’t allow the destruction of life at any stage. She became sure this little scrap of discarded life still lingered there in the Bardo, waiting to choose someone better. If Gwinny could ever become pregnant again, she might even be given a second chance and get the terminated one back again. Odder things happened.
Gwinny, by the way, hates the very word ‘abortion’, that torn and bloody grievous thing. ‘Termination’ was much more polite, safe and clean, as if a contract is under discussion.
But the more you wanted a baby, judging by the Smithsons, albatrosses and rocks round both their necks, the harder it was to get one and the more un-loving felt the activity. And worrying about not having a baby was what stopped you not having one. It was all a total nightmare.
Coleridge, by the way, obviously took the albatross for a much smaller sea bird, for example a petrel, or so the critics say. But a dead petrel would also get rather smelly and disgusting. I think Coleridge just liked the sound of ‘instead of a cross, the Albatross’ so much he ignored the fact that it made no sense. I got into trouble at school for saying as much, though Rozzie said it was a perfectly reasonable supposition. Rozzie had an eidetic memory, and once she had looked over the poem, at the age of four, could quote from it by memory. It took ages for the adult Clive to learn all 150 or so stanzas. Have patience, we will get to Rozzie presently. Just see me as the wedding guest: ‘He (the Ancient Mariner – me, that is) holds him with his glittering eye – The Wedding-Guest stood still, And listens like a three years’ child. The Mariner hath his will’ – as I tell this tale of how a fin de siècle turned into a début de siècle with the birth of Rozzie, the original, echte Millennial, born on January 1st 2000, a second after midnight struck.
Suspicion Dawns
Since Xandra had had two terminations in her teens and Clive said he had never to the best of his knowledge made a girl pregnant – ‘I always kept my head when all about me were losing theirs and blaming it on me’: Clive often misquoted from Kipling’s If – it seemed to Gwinny that Clive might very well be the one to blame for Xandra’s failure to conceive. Not ‘blame’ of course – apologies all round – say, rather, ‘responsibility’. The trouble was, put it nicely, that Clive failed to appreciate that though things could go wrong with ‘women’s insides’, as he called them, his were outside and obviously in totally good working order. How could they be otherwise? They were his. They were perfect. They rose and fell to order. Everything about him was perfect, you only had to look in a mirror to see. Except his vocal cords, which you couldn’t see, and that was a regrettable matter of youthful cocaine and bad advice from his singing coach when he was seventeen, the one who had told him not to shy away from the high notes of Close Every Door.
Xandra thought perhaps it was time to see a fertility expert, but the NHS only offered treatment to under thirty-fives, so she was already too old for that, and going private meant unnecessary expense. Clive wouldn’t approve of such a thing. She hesitated to argue the matter out with Clive: perhaps he was right, she was worrying unnecessarily, but the worry began niggling away more and more. She was in a quandary and when she was in a quandary she usually left it to Gwinny to sort out. Gwinny was obviously in favour of a baby and would know when the right time came to approach Clive.
Sometimes Xandra thought that Gwinny was closer to Clive than she was, apart from the sex, of course, in spite of her being so old. Indeed, Xandra wondered sometimes if she was being used almost as a surrogate mother for Gwinny’s child.
Doubting The Goddess
And I too had begun to doubt Flora and worry about Xandra’s biological clock, thirty-eight years old, and already the odds of her having a Down’s baby were beginning to creep up. I’d been down to West Hampstead and made a few more orisons this time to Demeter as well, Goddess of the harvest and the cycle of birth and death, and could have sworn she smiled at me, but the smoke was quite heavy in valerian, banana peel scrapings, oatmeal and passion fruit so I did not put too much credence in the experience, and Xandra went on drip, drip, dripping every four weeks on the dot. And still Flora did not come through with the goods. Perhaps I had annoyed her by sharing with Demeter – they could be rivals? Mea culpa, again.
Then I realised just how wry Demeter’s smile had been, or at any rate my perception of it, and how if she was saying anything it was ‘meet me half-way, buy a ticket’, and it occurred to me that a visit to an IVF clinic for the pair of them was in order.
Xandra was fertile enough – she had had two early terminations: she’d told me how much she regretted the suffering this had caused her mother. (It was usually Anna who suffered, I’d noticed, not Xandra, Anna being something of a narcissistic mother – defined as ‘a parent who is exclusively and possessively close to her child and may be especially envious of, and threatened by, their child’s growing independence’, so Xandra’s fertility was not in doubt. But Clive?
Clive had got to thirty-five without producing any progeny I knew about, though he had an active sex life and a not necessarily exclusive relationship with Xandra, though he was always very careful to keep his adventures to himself and not upset her. It was unusual for any man to be so lucky for so long. The fault might very well lie with Clive, though Clive would be outraged by the very idea.
I had very rarely brought the subject up: it tended to raise hackles if I did. They were perfectly entitled to change their minds about bringing a baby into the world. Because I had quite lightly mentioned once or twice that I hoped they’d start a family as I signed the mortgage guarantee, did not mean they had to go ahead and do it.
Having a baby was an expensive business and certainly not very fashionable. Couples these days valued the childless life, and the longer they had it the more they liked it. Romantic holidays, consumer durables, electronic must-haves, meals out in fancy restaurants, freedom and future itself – giving up all that in order to turn two into three, and the third a yawling, squalling monster who never slept? Now that was a real sacrifice, not just a burnt offering that could be put in a basket attached to your bicycle handles.
I was well aware that the new digital life would be inimical to sharing with a mewling, puking very non-digital infant. Okay when the kids turned into teenagers and could go shopping (preferably on Amazon) or watch football with you (table footie, perhaps?) and then look after you in your old age (A.I. robots were coming along fast), would the advantages show, but the years in between were too much like hard work to be endured. ‘The future’ was such a misty concept to most – you’d be dead before it happened, anyway.
One only had to look round the office at anyone who’d had a baby in the last couple of years, and see that the fathers could hardly keep awake and had fallen behind in the promotion stakes, and the mothers looked old and strained and annoyed everyone, arriving late and leaving early if they were there at all. It was no advertisement for parenthood.
Yet the young couple had been so sure that they meant to have children! If occasionally through the nineties I’d tried to bring up the subject, and asked about the pitter-
pat of little feet (a kind of joke between the three of us, if a rather nervy one) they’d laugh and say first they were ‘waiting until the house was finished’, and then it was ‘we have to wait before Xandra is settled in her so-called career’ (Clive always referred to it as ‘so-called’), and then it was something or other about maternity leave and timing, and then once an admittance they were trying like billy oh, but nothing seemed to be happening. But lots of time. ‘No hurry,’ they’d say. ‘No worries. Everything inside Xandra works like clockwork, and Clive works pretty well too.’
‘A guy’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,’ he misquoted John Wayne, creating a vision of him in cowboy gear leaping upon Xandra at all possible times of day or night, or so he claimed, and I’d no reason to think it wasn’t true. It also rather reminded me of my father saying after Owen’s birth that he ‘was a man, after all, and had a man’s needs’ and went on to produce Trefor and David. ‘Of course we want a baby. I love Xandra to bits. It’s just a matter of time. God knows I’m doing my best,’ Clive said. ‘It’s just – sometimes I get these migraines.’
He kept best practice for Xandra’s sake; if trying for a baby meant floppy underpants so be it. The alcohol and cigarette ban was good for weight and complexion, though surely applied to women only. More like a feminist plot to make men suffer, like insisting the father was there at the birth to witness ‘what he had done’, as if women hadn’t enjoyed it too and known the possible consequences. And he was not, he asserted, at all neurotic when it came to sex. The more the better. It helped him write.
