Cuckoo

by Wendy Perriam

Frances shrugged. ‘That’s all very well if you believe in polygamy, but I haven’t got a different man.’

  Rathbone grinned conspiratorially at the tradescantia trailing across his desk. ‘You could always try the milkman, my dear. I’m joking of course.’ Frances stared. He sounded deadly serious. ‘But – well – it has been known, Mrs Parry. And if you both want a baby so badly …’

  I’m not sure Charles does want one. She didn’t say it. It sounded ungrateful after all Mr Rathbone’s efforts, but to have a baby with a tradesman – Charles would expire. He believed in people sticking to their proper stations. Mr Rathbone really was eccentric. He looked like an elderly bishop with his black coat and his pinched, ascetic face, yet here he was more or less encouraging her to couple with the milkman.

  ‘But, Mr Rathbone – think of all the problems. And, anyway, couldn’t people tell? What about paternity tests and blood groups and all that sort of thing?’

  ‘Why should any husband bother? He’d just accept the babe as his own. They do, you know. And even if he were one of the rare suspicious ones, paternity tests are still notoriously unreliable – one of those grey areas of great complexity, which can always be obligingly confused.’

  Frances frowned. ‘But surely you’re not seriously suggesting …’

  ‘Of course not, my dear. Just a tip other women have found fruitful – ha ha – forgive my little joke. No, the best thing for you, Mrs Parry, is to forget all about this baby business and find yourself a little job.’

  Frances stood up. She found it infuriating when men referred to women’s jobs as ‘little’. No red-blooded man ever did a ‘little job’. But however responsible and arduous the job, if a woman took it on, it automatically shrunk in status.

  She’d worked for years, for God’s sake. And in a big job, a man’s job; had only given it up to have their non-existent baby. Maybe that was the trouble. She’d worked too long through all her fertile years, never doubting for a moment that she and Charles would produce their perfect 2.5 progeny the minute she stopped the Pill. Everything else had always gone right for them. Charles and Frances Parry Jones, the perfect couple. She wondered if their friends hated them, those well-bred, well-fed friends, who only said what was allowed in the rules. Who had written all those rules? Was it Charles, or his mother, or God, or the Royal Mid-Surrey Golf Club, or the Richmond Residents’ Association?

  Oh yes, they had it all. The elegant house on Richmond Green where they’d moved after their impeccable country wedding. The charming Norman church and the chic Vogue dress. Yet, she’d cried all night before the wedding, and hadn’t even known why. Gone through the ceremony like a puppet, smiling and mouthing until her face ached. It had seemed strange taking on his name. Frances Parry Jones was such a mouthful after plain Franny Brent. (Charles refused to call her Franny.) The name had always weighed her down. Like the house. The expensive, tasteful, dark, funereal house – Charles’ house, not theirs, too big, too perfect, for a pair of newly-weds. All the furniture came from his mother (who looked like a bow-fronted chiffonier herself) – Georgian desks and Chippendale chairs, priceless and uncomfortable antiques you couldn’t loll or sprawl in, and so much labour. Brass to polish and parquet to shine. Not that she had to do it. Charles’ mother found them Mrs Eady, another glum, sombre, unaccommodating thing. They never seemed alone. Mrs Eady in the mornings, grumbling about the rain ruining her washing, or the sun spoiling the furniture; Charles’ gilt-edged friends in the evenings, and the golf crowd at weekends. There wasn’t much of Franny left. Even her career was always overshadowed by Charles’. A Public Relations executive with a flair for fashion couldn’t hold a candle to an international finance consultant. Sometimes she wondered if she wanted a baby only to complete her, to give her a role and status denied to her by Charles. Something which wasn’t dark and overshadowed and antique.

  ‘Mr Rathbone, please. There must be something else you can do. I’m not a person who gives up easily, you know that. I don’t mind what I go through …’

  ‘My dear Mrs Parry, conceiving a baby is not meant to be an endurance test. If you could only relax, it would probably happen anyway. There’s nothing wrong with you, you know. Your temperature charts are perfect, you’re ovulating nicely, you’ve had a D and C, your tubes are open …’

  ‘Yes, I know all that, but nothing ever happens …’ She shrugged towards the door. It was stupid wasting time with this second-rate charlatan. She should have chosen a doctor with verve and dynamism, a man more like Charles. That was the trouble with having a husband like Charles – all other men seemed feeble in comparison.

  ‘Sit down, Mrs Parry, I can see you’re very overwrought. Look, there is one last thing I could suggest, although I hesitate …’

  What was he up to this time? A test-tube baby in a milk bottle, care of United Dairies?

  ‘Well?’ She strummed her fingers along the padded leather chair-arm. Rathbone was such an old muddler. Even now, he wasn’t looking at her, but punching his pen nib through the larger leaves of the tradescantia.

  ‘I could perhaps put you on one of the fertility drugs – just for a short trial period.’

  God Almighty! Sextuplets crawling over the front page of the Sun, television cameras peering down her womb, their house overrun with nappies …

  ‘I … er … don’t think Charles would be too keen on a multiple pregnancy.’

  Rathbone laughed. ‘No cause for alarm, my dear. I was merely thinking of Clomid. One of the less dramatic drugs. You may get twins on Clomid – 6.9 per cent I think the incidence is, but nothing worse than that.’

  Twins? Charlie and Franny? Two in one? Rather convenient, really. Save time, save money. Charles would approve of that. She opened her bag and took out her leather-covered memo-pad. (A present from her husband. Where other wives received boxes of Milk Tray, she was given memo-pads.) ‘Right, what is it? Where do I get it? When do I start? What are its side effects?’

  Rathbone needed pushing. He was far too ready to sit back and talk about relaxing. He could have put her on the Clomid months ago and the twins would be almost toddling round the golf course by now.

  ‘It’s very rarely given where women are ovulating as regularly as you are. That’s why I hesitate.… On the other hand, it may just work. It does seem to make a better ovulation. Now what you do is …’

  Frances uncapped her pen and recorded Rathbone’s instructions to the letter. She mustn’t get it wrong. Somehow, she felt this was going to be the answer – a wonder drug and twins.

  ‘Expect nothing, Mrs Parry – it’s much the best way. Then you won’t be disappointed. And, don’t forget, it’s most important to relax. Try to forget all about conceiving. There are other things in life, you know. Enjoy yourself. Take up a little hobby.’

  Little, little. Why was everything so infuriatingly little? She already had a hundred little hobbies – golf, tennis, music, art – the versatile woman who could turn out a soufflé or a fashion report with the same easy flair. But what was all that, when you couldn’t do the one thing that made you a woman? She was just an outward shell – smart clothes, fine accomplishments, but nothing inside. No baby, no womb working for its living, a hollow, a void, a failure.

  The sun was shining as she stepped outside. The sky was too blue for London, flecked with little puffy clouds which would have looked better on a chocolate box. Façades again. A smug heaven smiling down on all the world’s misery. It probably smiled like that on Vietnam. Or Auschwitz. Ridiculous to be so bitter. Hundreds of women couldn’t conceive. Ten per cent of all marriages were infertile, hadn’t Rathbone said? Discounting those who had their babies by the milkman. Did such things really happen? She and Charles were so ludicrously sheltered. Charles’ mother pursed up her lips if anyone so much as mentioned the word intercourse (let alone anything shorter), and her own mother thought a lesbian was a type of French table fowl. All around them were murder, infidelity and rape, and the worst any of them had managed in their two combined
families was to get a parking ticket.

  She crossed the road into Cavendish Square. A blackbird was singing in a tall plane tree and the grass was as bright as the enamelled surface of a Holman Hunt. She longed to lie down for a moment and sun herself among the daisies and the sparrows. But Charles had taught her that time was a precious commodity, not to be squandered. Every minute must be squeezed to yield maximum productivity. She bent down and let her fingers brush against the daisies. She’d squeezed all those minutes and what had she got to show for it – an elegant house, run as rigidly as NASA, a filing cabinet crammed with past PR campaigns, a full diary, and an empty womb.

  She left the square and crossed the road into the back entrance of D. H. Evans. She had promised Charles she’d buy him a new umbrella. Charles hated rain. He always cited it as one of the proofs of the non-existence of God. Any sensible craftsman would have made a world in which water seeped upwards into the fields, not downwards on to people’s city clothes.

  ‘Men’s umbrellas, please?’

  She should have gone to Brigg’s of Piccadilly – Charles preferred his brollies hand-made – but she felt too tired to jostle with the crowds in Regent Street. She tried to decide between a Peerless with a boarskin handle and a Fox with a real gold band, both black, both expensive. Another woman was buying a Union Jack umbrella in red, white and blue. She’d love to see Charles holding that above his pin-stripes. Or a Snoopy umbrella which said ‘Just singin’ in the rain’. Charles never sang, except at his Old Boys’ Reunion Dinner, once a year. She took the Peerless.

  She stood by the escalator, reluctant to go home. Charles would phone from Bahrain – a brief, formal phone call – yes, the flight had been fine; yes, he was tired; no, he hadn’t had time for sight-seeing.

  ‘Goodbye, darling.’

  ‘’Bye.’

  ‘Love you.’

  ‘Love you too.’

  The formula, then silence. The house to herself. Piano practice or an educational cassette. Cooking for the freezer or brushing up her bridge. Preparing that speech on Women in Publicity, ploughing through the latest Günter Grass. Mustn’t waste a moment. Charles had it all worked out. Günter Grass wasn’t waste, but Herman Hesse was. (Charles hated wishy-washy, unsubstantiated mysticism.) A Stravinsky concert counted, but Malcolm Arnold didn’t. She felt he marked her like a teacher. Three gold stars for practising her Bach. Two black crosses for yawning through Proust. It wasn’t all bad. It gave life a point and purpose. Charles swept her and the house into his own inimitable system, so that everything was certain, predictable and tidy. Charles ran his existence by a system of colour-coded notebooks – black for petty cash and bills outstanding, brown for household maintenance, green for his yearly gardening plan. There was even a crimson-coloured notebook for Christmas, with a countdown to the 25th, and a birthdays and anniversaries book, so they’d never forget a date or lose a friend; a check-list for holidays and hospitals; a household inventory; and a filing system which took up three-quarters of his study. Frances wondered sometimes if he had a notebook labelled ‘Frances’ (blue to match her eyes) which reminded him to buy her flowers on Fridays, and check her share returns, and spend three and a half minutes pleasuring each breast before he entered her. He did do all those things, and if sometimes she wanted to scream when he handed her another bunch of poker-faced carnations, that only proved what an ungrateful bitch she was.

  She jumped on the escalator. She didn’t feel like going home. First floor, fashions; second floor, coats; third floor, baby wear. She went right on up to the third. The word ‘baby’ was like a magic lure. While she’d been working, she’d hardly considered the whole teeming business of reproduction. It was something tedious and distant, which no doubt she’d get round to, all in good time, when she and Charles had fulfilled their other, more crucial ambitions. But, now, motherhood was almost an obsession. The whole of Oxford Street seemed to be seething with prams and pregnant women. London had turned into an ante-natal clinic. Every magazine was fixated on fertility. She’d cancelled the New Yorker and taken out a subscription to Mother and Baby. She pored over advertisements for front-fastening nursing bras and disposable nappies. She hid it all from Charles. Publicly, she went on reading Stendhal or Sartre, or discussed the anomalies of police pay, or whether the Arts Council was under-represented in the provinces. But underneath, there was a second, hidden life, where she peered into prams and studied her monthly cycle like a secret vice. She was almost ashamed of it. Women weren’t meant to want babies any more – only equality, and freedom and leisure. She had all those. Sometimes she suspected it wasn’t even the baby she wanted, but the pregnancy itself, that essential, biological badge of womanhood, whatever the libbers said. A unique, almost mystical experience that served as your membership card. It was like sex – if you hadn’t had it, you were shut out from the closed circle of other women, a stranger to their conversation and their coven.

  And, yet, pregnancy was almost obscene. Frances glanced at the hugely pregnant woman in front of her, choosing a fluffy pink jacket from the display rack. It annoyed her sometimes, watching these casually pregnant women lumbering all over London, displaying themselves in public. This one probably hadn’t even planned it. Perhaps the Durex had broken or her husband came home drunk. Maybe she had seven kids already, didn’t need another one? She looked ordinary enough, pale, with lank brown hair scraped back into a rubber band. But young – you had to give her that. She hadn’t wasted the best years of her marriage, being important and expensive and sterile.

  She stared at the woman’s stomach – vast, disgusting almost. Unthinkable to look like that. She herself was small and slim, with tiny hands and feet, and not a trace of flab. She had her weak points, of course, but at least there was nothing gross about her. A belly like that would be out of the question. She picked up a vest, a tiny scrap of cotton which wouldn’t fit a doll.

  ‘May I help you, madam?’

  Frances let it fall. She was trespassing, had no right to be there. She hadn’t joined that magic sisterhood. She squeezed past the stomach and on into the toy department. Another world apart. She and Charles were both only children, so there weren’t even nieces and nephews to buy for. She stopped in front of the teddies – expensive ones, with real suede paws, cheap ones with yellow mangy hair, enormous ones with eyes as big as paper-weights, and tiny ones for hanging in a pram. Perhaps she’d buy a toy for their baby – to make him more real. If she believed in the baby, maybe she would have him. There was always so much doubt, like with God, and Peace, and Love, and Perfect Sex, and all those other desirable things which never quite happened.

  She moved past the bears to seals and otters. Perhaps Charles would prefer a more serious beast – he believed in educational toys. He’d probably have the baby on sleep tapes, as soon as it was born. If it slept eighteen hours a day, as the baby books claimed, it would be a genius before it was even weaned.

  ‘I’d like to choose a toy for a baby.’

  ‘Certainly, madam. What age is the child?’

  ‘Well … still very young.’

  ‘You can’t go wrong with a bear, then. A nice cuddly teddy.’

  It was then she saw the lions. Proud, dignified creatures with magnificent manes and greeny-yellow eyes. A Leo would be perfect – Charles’ own birth-sign and the king of beasts. Infinitely more suitable for Charles’ child than a nice cuddly anything. All the lions were ridiculously expensive, but Charles wouldn’t mind. He insisted on quality, even in a toy.

  She didn’t want it wrapped. It seemed cruel, somehow, to reduce a lion to a brown paper parcel. She tucked him under one arm and smiled. She felt a little better.

  Frances sat in her Ince and Mayhew chair, with a Haydn string quartet on the stereo, and The Bostonians ready at her side, to read when it finished. Five gold stars. The lion sat opposite, ensconced in Charles’ chair. He looked faintly sardonic, as if life in Richmond Green left a lot to be desired. It was dark, quiet, lonely. She’d go to be
d early; always did when Charles was away. She switched off the lights, locked the front door, wrote a note to the milkman. ‘No milk.’ She stopped suddenly, in the middle of the ‘m’. Milkman – secret stud for all Mr Rathbone’s patients, father of a million happy babies. She didn’t even know what their milkman looked like. He came very early, before they were up, and she didn’t pay him in person. He left the bill in a milk bottle and Charles sent the cheque care of United Dairies.

  Had Mr Rathbone been serious? He sounded it. When he was joking, he pushed his spectacles half-way down his nose and put his funny face on. She hadn’t seen a trace of it. Would other women really take chances like that, risking random fathers for their children? How could you ever find out? People never said anything except what was allowed in the rules. In their set, it was always Sunday supplement conversation – David Hockney’s latest swimming pools, the new Buńuel at the Curzon, the test score, the Third World. But not their own world. Nothing lower than their heads. All the rest was unknown territory. Even with people one was closest to, her parents, for example. In thirty odd years, they’d never talked about anything personal. Her mother could be frigid and her father suicidal, for all she knew. They stuck carefully to safe, uncensored subjects – the pros and cons of organic fertilizer, why the National Trust should increase its admission fees. Charles was even worse. He kept his feelings in a safe, double-locked behind a steel wall, and only let them out occasionally, in meagre dribs and drabs; then banged the door tight shut again. She had never seen him cry. He rarely even shouted.

  And, yet, she couldn’t imagine a baby that wasn’t nine-tenths Charles. It was always a boy, with Charles’ straight, fair hair and full lips, with his tidiness, his order, his punctuality. No Parry Jones baby would dribble or doze, or mess up its nappies, or arrive off schedule.

  Perhaps it would be better to have a baby by the milkman. A normal, messy, uninhibited infant, with no ambition. Sometimes she longed to be like that herself. But she had always been ordered and ambitious. She couldn’t blame Charles. He’d simply made her worse.