After the Peace

by Fay Weldon

  ‘I’ll tell her in good time, darling,’ Clive warned Xandra in his new rich voice, or perhaps it was just his old one suddenly back again, finally recovered from the too many high notes and cocaine parties of the past. Xandra’s fault. Hitler, historians say, was blind for a full year from shell shock, and was cured overnight by a simple trick. The affliction was psychosomatic. Perhaps Clive had had some kind of Bond shock?

  ‘Is that why the champagne?’

  ‘Wait till we’re all sitting down and relaxed, darling Gwinny.’

  Both Clive and Xandra were rather over-free and generous with their darlings, Gwinny had always noticed, but she liked it. It made her feel secure in her welcome, which was not the case with everyone. So though intensely curious, she did relax. All three toasted ‘the future’ in Bollinger, and sat down to dinner. More, Clive and Xandra seemed to have given up their Atkins high-fat low-carb diet overnight; not an undressed salad leaf in sight along with the beef and onion stew, just piles of mashed potato. There was a block of butter on the table with an elegant little horn-handled butter knife stuck into it. No. 23 had never seen a butter knife in all its existence. The brothers would have laughed themselves silly.

  Only when plates were half empty did Clive explain. Then he talked and talked, animatedly and with many actorly gestures, in the new persuasive crooner’s voice. Clive acknowledged that mumps in fucking adolescence could in a few cases affect a man’s fertility – he’d assumed just the vocal cords could be affected, as if that wasn’t crap enough. Xandra should have stuck to the National Health if she was really worried, which he personally wasn’t. If Xandra would only take time off work and rest: then it would be simply a matter of time.

  ‘Anyway,’ Clive said, his assertive new voice dropping a pitch to one that wooed and seduced, ‘I shouldn’t have been such a grumpy bear at breakfast, I’m sorry.’ No, he hadn’t been offered the James Bond job though he had been offered a small part which he’d turned down. A figure of fun in James Bond Jr, an animated TV spinoff, as Oddjob the minder, hilarious, because a big man with a squeaky voice always is.

  ‘And then this peculiar thing happened, you darling dears.’

  ‘Seconds, anyone?’ asked Xandra, adding a dollop of mashed potato to Clive’s plate, to sop up the gravy. Far from Atkins, but she loved him, and this was a special day.

  ‘Not now, darling. I’m telling Gwinny what happened. Isn’t the voice marvellous?’

  And he tried it out there and then, a scale from bottom to top, bass to tenor and even a hint of counter-tenor so a glass clock on the mantelpiece shook and made a vague pinging sound.

  ‘Oh please darling, treat the voice gently. It’s so new! The high notes—’

  ‘Fuck the high notes. It’s the voice of my fathers but safer now I’m older. It does what I tell it to. The power of Tom Jones, the thrill of Richard Burton, all mine, returned. Oh, rejoice!’ How he did talk, but at least the squeak was silenced.

  ‘Oh please,’ said Gwinny, ‘please, just tell. What was the peculiar thing?’

  ‘Hear me out,’ said Clive. ‘I haven’t finished. Wait till I get to the end of my sentence. It’s impolite to interrupt, and surely, at such a juncture!’

  ‘Yes,’ cried Xandra, reproaching, doling out slices of Waitrose Apple Pie, and bringing out the cream jug. ‘Let Clive do it his way, Gwinny.’

  ‘A simple blow to the side of the bloody head, darling,’ said Clive, the lure of invective getting the better of the joys of declamation. ‘That’s all it took, Gwinny. All those crap procedures, all those stupid fucking medicos, curse them all. The NHS ruined my career when all that was needed was a little tap on the head.’

  ‘That was BUPA,’ said Xandra.

  ‘Don’t spoil a good story,’ Clive rebuked her. She shut up. I don’t know why I felt victorious. I suppose it was the incident on the step. Women are so competitive with each other. She was twenty years younger than me and still I’d had him. [Writers’ Huddle says the switch to first person would have been okay here had I put it in brackets.] Forget that it was already out of Clive’s head, washed away in a tide of animation and song.

  That morning, it seemed, Clive had decided to cheer himself up by dyeing his hair to get rid of some errant grey – which had been toning down the golden brown – and an idiot of an arsehole of a producer had made some comment. He was just unwrapping the silver foil when he’d slipped and fallen and hit the side of his head on the edge of the bath and passed out.

  He’d bled a bit but not much. It was more shock than cut. He’d been all alone in the house because Xandra was out to work. He’d come to and said shit, fuck, and cursed the bath as one does, and had felt his own voice vibrating in his chest. It was different, deeper.

  ‘The blow had cured it, Gwinny. Rearranged some flip in the brain’s wiring. It happens. If a sudden blow can make the blind see, the deaf hear, why not the dumb speak?’

  He’d re-read his play and decided it was crap. He’d deleted it. One click of a mouse and it was gone. All gone.

  ‘Eight years’ work at least!’ said Gwinny. ‘First there, then not there. Awesome!’

  ‘Clive is so decisive,’ said Xandra. She is not exactly a fool, thought Gwinny, but she has to survive somehow and how else but by being in love? All that sex had worked its hormonal power. And some kind of mother-love must have worked on her, Gwinny, too, to have rendered her so forgiving all those years. And now she had had another one. Madness.

  She felt guilty and excited at once, the lure of the forbidden. But she must act on principle, forget all that had happened. Women should not betray one another or all feminist ideals were in vain. Clive was a victim of his own male drives and must be excused. She was still uncomfortable ‘down there’ as Gwen had trained her to say, in the days when sex was a mystery and parts never named, but she rather liked it. The sensation was rather comforting.

  Tomorrow they would go to the clinic again. Clive would be declared as infertile. What then? A donor? Anyone to father the longed-for baby, when it came to it, and at least it wouldn’t be Clive.

  Possibilities Occur

  The next day the three of them were back at the clinic. Clive was cheerful and in full voice. The waiting room was emptier than before, more like a mausoleum than ever but with only two immobile old ladies sitting next to one another on the upright chairs. Xandra had been whisked away at once and very shortly a white-coated man of some foreign ethnicity appeared and fell into the normal small-male trope of worshipping deference to men taller, younger and better-looking than themselves, humbly apologising for interrupting, all of which suited Clive very well, and asking Mr Smithson to accompany him. Mr Smithson was to see Dr Vellum’s senior colleague. Clive went without demur, other than looking back to Gwinny, and saying, ‘Better than the bastard NHS, innit?’ Gwinny saw the white-coated shoulders stiffen.

  Gwinny looked through the magazines on the big central polished mahogany table and noticed an expensively produced brochure for the Woolland Brilliant Baby Sperm Bank. On the back cover was a quote from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, Clive’s favourite philosopher-poet:

  Your children are not your children.

  They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

  They come through you but not from you,

  And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

  It was possible, thought Gwinny, that even if Clive did turn out to be fertile, he was not necessarily the best father around for Xandra’s baby. He was too impetuous, too actorly. Clive at twenty, perhaps, with his Dreamcoat just behind him, but not now, at thirty-six. Bitterness had entered into his soul, along with idleness, and if you had any belief in the new evidence that acquired characteristics could affect DNA and therefore sperm, Clive’s might not be the best in the world. Though New Scientist could have it all wrong or herself misremembered.

  Xandra, of course, might still be thinking otherwise, seeing no further than that Clive was the best lover, f
orget the best husband, if only because opposites attract – but how easily are women not blinded to a man’s true nature? Xandra, with her twelve years of frequent unprotected sex while hoping to get pregnant, every act sealing her fate. As a result she had been tranquillised, oxytocinased to moral death. No wonder, fucked stupid, she traipsed up to the hospital every day meekly and obediently, just to serve an unfaithful and ungrateful husband while spouting feminist doctrine with the best. Clive and Xandra, Gwinny realised, were so in the habit of believing they were in love with each other that not even the passage of time could break the bonds. But it was a delusion, a folie à deux, a mwah-mwah habit. Time for it to stop. Truth and reality must out.

  And here on these glossy expensive pages she found list after list of other possibilities.

  Gwinny flicked through page after page of potential donors, 2,000 of them, drawn silhouettes with features blanked out, each with a few brief lines of description printed between their ears – blond hair, blue-eyed (meaning white, one supposed, in the same way as black hair, brown-eyed suggested ‘otherly ethnic’), alleged profession (medical student, accountant, engineer, explorer seemed to be favourites, each with a clumsy attempt to describe a lifestyle (family guy, physics whiz, guitar supremo, life and soul of the party) – strict anonymity and HFEA registration observed and required, rigorous screening checks performed, healthy sperm guaranteed and ‘quested by our talented medical staff’ (one did rather hope not ‘provided by’: wasn’t there an elderly IVF doctor in London who went to prison for fraudulently fathering eighty-four children?) and ‘a great family-building option no matter what your circumstances’. Heights were in there too – ranging from 5ft 10in – the shortest any donor would admit to – to 6ft 2in. Lots of those. Her eye fell upon ‘6ft 1in, blue eyes, blond hair: BA (Oxon), action man, aristocrat’. She rather fancied that. She had to peel off an ‘old stock half price’ sticker to see it properly. She dropped it into the waste bin. Frozen donor sperm was meant to last for ever. The Brilliant Baby Clinic was being over-cautious.

  It was a great and tempting offering, thought Gwinny. She slipped the brochure into her bag. A whole new race of children conceived without love, perhaps, born not of the attraction which drew couples together, but with any luck into a loving family. A lucky dip, since free choice so often ended up a failure. And any baby was better than no baby. Life was getting boring as her years advanced; there were no more brothers at hand to rail against, and the chance of new sexual encounters less common.

  Even Gwinny’s ginger cat Simkins Two was slowing down; these days just a vast shapeless mass curled up on a cushion, no longer a skinny, manic leaper-up the dusky velvet curtains, hanging there by its claws in a mad-eyed effort to entertain. And without an infusion of new life into the Smithsons’ next-door existence, it was all going to be pretty much the same. Entropy. On the other hand an infant off-shoot of Clive, eaten up by narcissism and vanity, crawling round and declaiming his woes, did seem a trifle off-putting. The lucky dip of a sperm bank would be preferable.

  And then the peace of the waiting room was broken by Xandra running in, click, click on polished floor, flushed and looking wonderfully young and happy as she had been on her wedding day, before time and life had worn her down.

  Gwinny’s heart melted. It always did. And for poor Clive of the many mishaps as well. He was a wounded Apollo, and Achilles with a sore foot.

  ‘Oh Gwinny,’ Xandra cried, ‘Dr Vellum is such a lovely, lovely man, adorable! There is nothing wrong with my innards, nothing wrong with me at all. I am as fertile as can be!’ And Xandra approached Gwinny as if to hug her, but since Gwinny had been brought up in an era where people did not hug one another easily and if they told someone they loved them it was with a love that included sex, she drew back from the embrace – to the relief of the two motionless old ladies who still remained in the waiting room.

  ‘Of course he’s adorable. He’s paid to be adorable. He’s a snake oil merchant. They’re all adorable,’ said Gwinny, rather crossly. Her own voice could be quite piercing but Gwinny had concluded that the immobile ladies were too deaf to hear, if indeed they were human at all and not just holograms.

  Even as she spoke one was called for and then the other. Both were in wheelchairs but one seemed to be in charge of the other, and directed a malevolent look at Gwinny as she pushed by. Gwinny thought she heard ‘Some people just don’t know how to behave,’ but may have imagined it, the old paranoiac cluster personality disorder surfacing. It had been quite a stressful time.

  ‘No, no,’ cried Xandra, who seldom noticed what was going on if it did not concern her directly. ‘Dr Vellum really cares. He’s a truly great guy, and his colleague is the best in London, or Clive wouldn’t have seen him in the first place. So courteous and polite and wise, all of them here. Dr Vellum says it’s all because of Clive, not me. Clive’s sperm are missing or immobile. Pre-pubertal mumps with complications.’

  ‘Can’t the immobile ones be speeded up?’ The implication of sterility was fearful, though the satisfaction of being right was great.

  ‘You don’t understand. It’s medical. No. And certainly not at this stage of genetic technology,’ said Xandra. She sounded rather relieved. ‘We may have to adopt.’

  It was at this point Clive strode into the waiting room with his beautiful face like Zeus in a bad mood, and his eyes as when Lord Krishna hurls his thunderbolt (I see nothing wrong with veering between Hellenism and Buddhism), glassy and staring.

  ‘Bloody incompetent cunt of a quack,’ he squeaked. [Writers’ Huddle: ‘No! The c-word never gets forgiven. Yet on the other hand “cunt of a quack” does have quite a ring to it.’] ‘Stupid idiot. No idea of what he’s talking about. And now I’m going to be late. This is disastrous.’

  Yesterday’s melodious voice had been forgotten, washed away in a tide of vitriol. It was as if every wrong, major or minor, that he had ever suffered burst from him like a pus-filled boil. Poor Clive, so vainly and desperately trying to hide self-knowledge from himself, blaming everything and everyone, never himself. It must be really exhausting.

  Clive took the car keys from Xandra’s pocket, jingled them briefly in front of her, and said, ‘I’m already late, darling. I’ll take the car,’ and went off into gathering gloom and cold, leaving Xandra and me to find a taxi, which at this time of day in Harley Street was not the easiest thing in the world.

  A Wake-Up Call

  Xandra speaking. [Writers’ Huddle: ‘Okay, great, Gwinny, at last, for once! You haven’t given Xandra much of a chance to speak for herself, poor lovesick loon.’]

  So now I had another set of problems. Dr Vellum had certainly seemed to think yesterday that I was in denial of some kind. He was a pleasant friendly man, lean and bespectacled in a dark grey suit – expensive, I thought. So it was more like talking to a close friend rather than a doctor.

  ‘You mean it’s never even occurred to you that it might be your husband’s fault, not in all these years? Handsome girl like you, Xandra – I may call you Xandra? – and at it all the time, to all accounts and no contraception? That’s very strange for the obviously bright medical professional you are. Perhaps you’re just in denial of what you very reasonably suspect?’

  ‘I love my husband, if that’s what you mean by at it,’ I said, without thinking. And he laughed; brown warm crinkly eyes and such a crisp white coat now over the elegant suit. Our hospital laundry just squashes instead of irons.

  ‘Of course you love him. And so you should. Anyone would. I take it he’s the Clive Smithson who was Joseph in that glorious production of The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat how long ago? Ten, twenty years back?’

  It was so long ago but still people remembered. The future had seemed so assured. Clive’s success as the great singer, dancer was a blissful certainty. That and the whole world’s future, come to that. We shall overcome, some day. Mind you, even back then the IRA was planting bombs all over the place, though nothing compared to what was to come fr
om other quarters.

  ‘More like twenty,’ I said, sadly. ‘We were all so young then.’

  ‘And never sired a child himself?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘So my colleague tells me. The news is not good, I’m afraid. Your husband developed pre-pubertal epididymo-orchitis as a child.’

  It was probably his way of breaking news gracefully but I knew what that meant. A child with salmonella had actually died from it when under my care.

  Clive was indeed infertile. It was good to be right about something.

  ‘Time to think of donor sperm,’ he said.

  Marriage Can Be Difficult

  I’d dragged Clive along to the Brilliant Baby Clinic more from nervousness than anything else, and to keep Gwinny from nagging away at me to get pregnant. We do need to keep on the right side of Gwinny; I can afford the mortgage all right but not the expensive electronic gear Clive needs on my salary. Sex is so much better without contraception! So never getting pregnant really quite suited me for ages, until the baby urge cut in. But now my cover’s been blown and I have to rethink everything.

  Don’t mistake me; I really do love Clive. When we were in our teens we joined together like magnetised iron filings – clunk! – and never thereafter wanted to be parted. But he can be quite difficult. If you asked me whether I loved my job or Clive most I wouldn’t know how to answer. I’d certainly been rather nervous that when he did come face to face with the good doctor, and perhaps didn’t hear the news he wanted, Clive would not be his normal polite and charming self. He saw himself as a very successful virile man. And so he was, he just didn’t have all those swimming, diving little homunculi spurting out of his cock that other men do. [Writers’ Huddle: ‘Ouch! Yuk! No!’]

  Clive had had bad news. I had had good. I was fertile, he was not. I hadn’t thought through the consequences when I broke my unspoken bond with the NHS and went private. Clive was my Knight in Shining Armour, I was the Princess he’d deigned to rescue and would bear the brunt if anything went wrong with our shared happy-ever-after vision of ourselves. I would stand by his side.