by Graham Swift
He said, had we considered artificial insemination? On a vet’s lips it didn’t sound so unseemly. I said yes—and no. We’d rejected it, the whole matter was closed. It had always sounded, I said as a joke, like something that happened in a farmyard. He smiled and said he’d decided long ago against being an agricultural vet. He was more a domestic-animals man. But he said they’d made great strides in artificial insemination, the human kind, even in the last four or five years. “Strides,” I remember thinking, was an unhappy choice of word.
“Maybe,” I said, “but—no.”
I’d already told him, and it was an immense thing to have said, that the “difficulty”—the reproductive difficulty—was with your dad. But, again, once the subject had been broached, how could these further levels of honesty be avoided? It wasn’t like letting it slip over a dinner table and a glass too many to some mutual friend. But the fact is I’d never, in six years, said it to anyone else.
What else did I tell our trusty vet? My honest age: thirty-two, nearer thirty-three now. Married for eight years. That I was an only child. That my father had just died. That I hardly saw my mother. And he told me, as if reciprocation was only fair, that he had two kids, a boy and a girl, teenagers already, amazingly, but he saw them these days “by appointment only” (a little fragile smile), since last year he’d got divorced. “Family planning—in reverse,” he said. Perhaps he wasn’t, himself, he said, such a perfect domestic animal.
And, of course, he’d asked me what my husband did for a living. And I’d told him, with the usual circumspection I had with that information, and he’d sat back, truly impressed.
I have to say that after Otis’s return I’d stopped my crying. Or I thought I had. I mean my seemingly incurable capacity to be sabotaged by tears at odd and inconvenient moments, at least to have to fight them back. Tears for my dead father, or for Otis who might be dead too. Tears for my father and for Otis hopelessly mixed. But when Otis came back, I went dry-eyed. I reset my sights.
What normally compensates for the loss of a parent? Not, really, a cat. To Mike’s parents, to your Grandpa Pete and Grandma Helen, it must have looked, later that year, as if a perfectly understandable and not uncommon reaction had taken place. If, all the same, we’d left it a bit late.
I said to your dad, “I told him that you edit The Living World. He was bloody impressed, you know.” And your dad looked pretty pleased, if he batted it off. “Well, that’s someone who reads it,” he said.
At that stage I didn’t mention anything else.
“Well, there you are. You should meet him. You should take Otis in yourself one day and have a chat with him. He’d be pleased, I’m sure.”
It was a little later that spring that I said, “Mikey, listen to me. I want us to think about it again. A.I.D. I want us to reconsider.”
It wasn’t an edict or an insistence or, certainly, a foregone conclusion. I wanted to reopen the debate. But I didn’t get the impression, either, that it had struck your father like a bolt from the blue. He didn’t say yes straight away, but it was different now, we both knew it. He looked sympathetic. Things had happened. And I was thirty-two.
And things, after that, actually happened quite fast. 1978 was quite a year. By midsummer, seventeen years ago this month, I was booked in for my first “procedure.” As it turned out, it was the first of only two—which, I can tell you, is very good going. By mid-September I’d become pregnant. Though it’s not that bit, you’ve always been able to work that out, that will be such news to you.
21
SO NOW YOU KNOW what awaits you, what your father will tell you in his own words. I don’t know what precise words he’ll use, if they’re in his head right now, rehearsed and honed over sixteen years—if so, he’s never let me hear them—or if he’ll simply let the moment itself produce them. And, whatever they are, I can’t be sure at all how you’ll react to them.
Tonight you’re like those two new babies again, back at Davenport Road, still deep in that time before you met your memory—or the one we gave you. I don’t want you to be like that, I want you to be Nick and Kate, sixteen years old and as grown-up and as unimpededly advanced into your lives as sixteen can be. But tonight, though you don’t know it and can’t help it, you’re like babies again. So, right now, is your father.
I’m in a house full of sleeping babies. Even this rain, like some second guardian, seems aware of it and is pressing a finger to its lips: Sssshhhh…
Whether he’s learnt his lines or not, Mike must have played the scene so often in his mind that tomorrow will be like waking into a dream. He’s dreaming now, poor man. But I really can’t predict, I don’t think I have the right to, how you’ll react. I picture a bomb going off and this house falling to bits. I picture everything remaining oddly, precariously, ominously the same. An unexploded bomb. It still might go off—next week, the week after, any time.
Your father isn’t your father. He’s going to tell you himself. Who better? But what I hope he’ll tell you too, after giving you all the necessary facts, is that if he could have chosen, if it worked like that and it were just a matter of choosing, then he simply couldn’t have chosen better. And I hope you’ll think, I hope you might always have thought, that it’s the same for you, the other way round. Your dad.
There are plenty of “real” families (I have to use that expression) where it can seem, after all, that all the wrong choices got made. If only they could choose again, start again. And one day, perhaps not so far in the future, it will all be a matter of choice. Mike seems to think so. He has his peculiar, private reasons for thinking so, maybe, but then he’s still technically a biologist and he’s publisher of Living World Magazine, ear close to the scientific ground. Not that we all don’t pick up the vibrations.
Mike thinks it’s coming, even sooner than we might suppose. It’s upon us. Give it thirty years, he says. Soon it will all be a matter of genetic engineering. Old-fashioned human biology will have had its day. Which means, when you think about it, though I don’t want to think about it, least of all tonight, that you may at some point in your future be one of just a few, peculiar, old-style generations to see sprouting up around you the first generation of made-to-measure infants.
Or, as you’ll discover tomorrow, you’re already part of a gathering process. Since even sixteen years ago your dad and I had our choices, our freedoms, which simply wouldn’t have been there not so very long before. And what “strides” haven’t been made since? We could specify, we could stipulate, up to a point—you should know this—before you were born. All down to science. We could even see you before you were born. That’s a commonplace bit of magic now, I know, but your Grandpa Pete and Grannie Helen or Grandpa Dougie and Fiona were never able to see Mike and me.
And how wonderful it was, to see you.
We were born in the historic year of 1945, when a lot of big things happened, but your dad will tell you (he’s told me enough times) that the biggest thing to have happened this century was a quiet little event that occurred in a laboratory: the discovery of the structure of DNA. Though, as your dad will be the first to admit, he didn’t have a clue about it at the time. He was only eight years old, it was 1953. It was before he started spending those summers at Uncle Eddie’s, learning about frogspawn and birds’ eggs or whatever, a biologist in the making. But even when he was doing that, he hardly had a clue about DNA.
I’m not sure that Uncle Eddie, with all his old-fashioned natural-history books and mahogany collecting boxes, would have done either. Perhaps it was “Uncle” Tim, Tim Harvey—then sole editor of The Living World—who brought the momentous news, on one of those weekend visits to his old chum at Coombe Cottage. Have you heard, Eddie, have you heard? The Living World was about to devote a whole special issue to this extraordinary discovery…
I picture him and Uncle Eddie sitting up late into the night, Uncle Eddie puffing hard on his pipe, chewing it all over. And I picture them in subsequent years, when your dad wo
uld have been there too, a nipper of nine or ten sleeping upstairs, wondering: should they tell him, should they try to explain to the lad, or just let him get on with his “Nature Study”? A little like people must have said in that year that I was born: Have you heard? They’ve dropped an atom bomb, on Japan. Should we try explain it to the kids?
Your dad and I were born before DNA. Those innocent times. Of course, it had always existed, it was always there, it was just that nobody really understood it yet. And when they did, I can’t say I was any the wiser. I’ve grown up with it all around me, but I can’t say that I could tell you even now, and biologist’s wife though I am, what it is. No doubt you could tell me, it’s part of basic education these days.
In any case, tonight wouldn’t be the right time to say you should ask your father.
For some reason, when I think of DNA I can’t help thinking of my dad, cracking those codes in a sort of wartime laboratory, and blundering one day into the arms—and, oh Lord, the legs—of a pretty secretary called Fiona.
Your dad isn’t your dad. It wasn’t ever possible that he could be. But what I want you to know is that I wanted him to be. Oh, how I wanted him to be. I still wanted him to be even when that decision was taken that, though he wouldn’t be, you would still have a father. I only wanted him to be, in a way, even more then. I still want him to be now.
That same year, that same busy, roller-coaster year of 1978, we went to Venice for a weekend. It was June. It was our anniversary, as it will be again very soon, but it wasn’t a special anniversary. It was our eighth. Is there some humble metal for eighth anniversaries? Nickel? Steel? Zinc? And it was one of those several weekends of ours that were effectively subsidised by my employers, Walker and Fitch.
Simon had even said in his wrong-footing way, “Fancy a weekend in Venice?” All I’d have to do was meet someone from Montebello’s—a convenient Friday lunch, say. It could all be done in a day, in fact. But Simon was clearly dangling a bait. A weekend for two possibly, I dared to ask, in my most insinuating mode. He went through an act of looking totally askance. But we came to a not unfamiliar deal: that we—Mike and I, that is—would find the extra air fare. A room for two was hardly any different from a room for one.
Though it didn’t have to be the Rinaldi Palace. This really was a present from Simon. “Since it’s your anniversary, Paula. I really didn’t know. And since you’ve been with us for nearly as long.”
I think he did know it was our anniversary coming up, though maybe he was simply thinking: she’s had a tough year, she’s still getting over her dad. Sweet Simon, I’d learnt it wasn’t hard to be nice to him. And all I had to do was meet Signor Masi from Montebello’s and be nice to him over a long lunch. Simon perhaps knew what he was doing—he might have gone himself.
I said to Mike, “You’ll have to kick your heels, Mikey, while I go and meet this man.” He looked scrutinisingly at me. “The things girls have to do,” he said, “for the sake of art.” It was Venice, I said, there’d be things he could do. I said he should go and look at the Tiepolos in the Scuola dei Carmini, one can’t look enough.
A Thursday night to a Saturday night: our anniversary on the back of a business trip. But it was rather more than that. It was our way also of marking, confirming—“celebrating” isn’t really the word—our decision: to go ahead, with “A.I.D..” My first appointment was booked, in fact, for the following week. It had all been fully resolved.
And yet. And yet we made love that weekend more busily and intensely, I believe, than we’d ever done in all our semi-wishful resortings to hotels. As if the opposite of the situation were really the case and this was our last chance, a desperate, last-ditch bid for the real thing. Maybe the unique magic of Venice…Maybe a room (last-ditch?) overlooking the Grand Canal…
And maybe I was the more intense. No, I know I definitely was. Mike had made his commitment. He wanted this weekend simply to endorse his assent—to reassure me. I think he was even bewildered by my intensity. He’d never known me quite this crazy for it.
And perhaps even Signor Masi registered, and possibly misinterpreted, that our long (altogether too long for me) lunch in one of Venice’s finest restaurants was touched by a tingle of sexual impatience. Had it helped to swing the deal Walker’s wanted? Did Mike even think, when we teamed up again in our hotel room in the late afternoon, that this Signor Masi had turned me on? He hadn’t, actually. He was large and round and bald and (I have to say it) over fifty, though his name was, potentially, a turn-on. It was Sergio, Sergio Masi. I never mentioned that to your father.
For whom I was just crazy, anyway. What must you think of your mother? Shut your ears again if you wish.
It was late afternoon. We very quickly abandoned all possibility that we would simply change and go out for the evening. No, not yet. We pulled close the shutters onto our balcony, so the room had that faintly fiery glow. My linen dress was soon over the back of a chair. The hubbub from the Canal below was like something simmering in some magnificent kitchen. I’m not supposed to say these things to you, but I was very soon in a position on top of your father, though it went against all mechanistic wisdom about the best position to be in for getting pregnant. It went against, so to speak, the gravity of our situation.
Outside, the evening was just blooming and Venice was turning gold. All that treasure, all that glow. Camparis were being sipped at little sunset-catching tables. What setting could be richer, fuller? And yet I thought, even as I straddled your father, of all that wasn’t there then, of all that was missing. What could possibly be missing?
Otis, for a start, wasn’t there. He wasn’t missing in that awful former sense, but he was consigned once again to Felix Lodge. How callous of us. And in his barely recovered condition. And how we’d suffered when he had been missing. This afternoon passion had nothing to do with him, with his purring, furry prompting. Or perhaps it had everything.
I thought of what can be missing even when you can seem to have everything—all of Venice lying at your feet. In a little while we ourselves would be sitting, showered and coolly dressed and mellow with recent lovemaking, at one of those little tables, in the even richer light. A good-looking couple, in their early thirties, on their anniversary. A glorious evening in Venice, let’s not waste it. Seize it, treasure it.
Mike would have zipped up my dress, kissed my neck, grabbed the room keys, patted my bottom as he opened the door.
It was then that those dried-up tears came back for a brief unstaunchable while. It’s a watery city, after all. That’s what I said later, laughing it off, to your father. I cried in every sense that weekend. Cried out, as a woman will cry out, in the throes—audible, perhaps, even to those passing in the marbled corridor of the Rinaldi. I don’t know where I stand on the volume scale, but I was louder, maybe, than I’d ever been, that weekend.
But I just cried too, in the other way, if the two cries can sometimes be hard to separate and though I tried to hide it. I stayed on top of your father—perhaps you really shouldn’t be listening—even when I’d finished my crying out aloud and even when I’d begun to feel that warm stuff from him, that stuff that was the essence of the matter, beginning to trickle out of me. I was trying to stop it. And Mike, looking up, would have seen that my eyes were squeezed tight as well. I was trying but failing to stop them from trickling too.
22
I’VE GOT TO THE NUB, but there are harder things still to come, things your dad won’t even touch on tomorrow. I think it’s important that since you came into the world as you did you should know every twist and turn of the journey. I’m your mother, and now the truth is going to be uncovered, there should be no little residues of secrecy. A clean breast, as the saying goes, though it was my breast that fed you long ago and fed you from the beginning with the lie about your dad.
It was a factor from the very start, I mean even in those weeks before we went to Venice, it was a key part of the “debate”: the question of lying. You can’t get away fr
om it. The biological necessities are plain, but the issue of dissimulation gets trickier and trickier, the more you think about it. When do you tell, how long do you leave it? Well, now you know our answer to that. But who else, if anyone, do you tell meanwhile? It was principally your Grandma Helen and your Grandpa Pete. Your Grandma Fiona was a more academic proposition.
To tell or not to tell. Suppose, having set out, for the best and most carefully considered reasons, on a course of pretence, your deception is suddenly rumbled? And how good, anyway, will you be at pretending? It’s no easy ride. It’s a little like being a secret agent and never being able to relax your cover story. What starts out as the simple task—which isn’t simple at all—of acquiring offspring becomes a task of reconstructing the world.
And, as of tomorrow, I’m afraid it will become your task too. You’ll have to take on your share of the lying—that is, of course, if you want to. Since it will very quickly become clear from what your father will tell you that we’ve told no one else, that we’ve lied, if you like, all round. Which sounds rather shocking. Though perhaps not as shocking as discovering that for sixteen years everyone else knew and you were the last to find out.
It’s just within these walls, just the four of us. And Edward.
But then that’s clearly a lie too. I confess it. It goes without saying that, apart from your dad and me, there would have been certain people in the know for strictly clinical reasons, though they don’t count, since they were bound by professional codes. But haven’t I just said that I blurted it all out one day to our vet? Hardly a clinical disclosure. Or, more accurately, it was our vet, Alan Fraser, who was the first outsider to rumble our situation, still in its merely conceptual stage, and I had no choice but to own up. As I’m owning up to you.
Our vet knew, for one. And I think Otis knew, for another. I know that sounds preposterous. He could hardly have been listening, you’re thinking, on that examination table, to what I said to our vet. Has your mum gone daft? But I think he knew anyway, even before that. Cats can tell things, perhaps.
