"So, hi, Mer. Is that right, Mer?"
She nodded.
"Is that short for anything?"
"Meret."
"Huh?" She'd been introduced as an artist, whatever that meant. "Oh, I wonder if that is after the fur teacup guy. Meret Oppenheim."
"Yes, that's me. Eccentric artist parents. But she wasn't a guy, she was a woman."
He felt put in the wrong. She was pretty, but he was looking for an exit.
"I'm so glad to meet you. I really admire your writing."
This was a first. They all knew about Spence's literary ventures and were politely uninterested. As far as anyone else was concerned he was Anna's househusband. He warmed to this girl (she didn't look more than eighteen). "You've read something of mine? Really? Of your own free will? Did you find it online? My God, may I touch you?"
She laughed. "I meant Shere Khan. Of course I've read it. I think it's terrific."
The penny dropped. "Oh, you're Meret Hazelwood."
Spence had been insulted when Fiona the agent suggested he try writing for children, but it had been no effort to rattle off one of the Shere Khan adventures (Jake hanging over his shoulder, first and best critic). The publishers had liked it, in fact they'd liked it so well he'd already turned in the second installment. They had matched him with an illustrator, he'd known she lived somewhere close, but he hadn't wanted to meet her. So this was she, and thank God he hadn't said anything rude about her pictures.
"But, um, I thought Alice said a different name," he bleated, embarrassed, because he really should have known, and because he hadn't caught the other name, either.
"I'm really Meret Craft. That's my married name." Spence was the one caught out, but the girl was blushing: she raised her chin with a brave air of defying her traitor complexion. "But I have read 'Kes'f.' I'd read it before."
"Huh, oh you mean Sef."
"Weird name,"
"It's a password I don't use anymore. Look. . .can I get you another drink?"
She smiled at him shyly, lips closed. He went to the kitchen to fill their plastic cups with côte de decaying nuclear power station, feeling oddly shaken. So he had a colleague, a colleague of his own, first time since he left Emerald City, how exciting. He thought of Madame Bovary, J'ai un amant, un amant .. .! In the door to the garden a tall lean guy in green linen trousers and a white Nehru jacket was standing, turned half-profile, his dark hair cut en brosse, beard shadow on his jaw, something familiar about him. Spence took the cups back.
"So was K... I mean Sef, was it true?" asked Meret, smiling more eagerly, showing small white teeth.
"Ah—"
"Is that a very naive thing to ask?"
"Well, it was when I was fifteen, sixteen. I made the boy in the book thirteen because I thought that was sexier: more pubertal. It's true that I learned to fence, one summer, and had some of those things happen—"
"To be different, because you hated ball games. And the tramp in the woods, who lived under an old hospital bed, and kept the castors oiled so he could sail away on it—"
"If the white-coats came after, yeah, he was real."
She laughed. "I think you're telling me what I want to hear. Did you keep up the fencing?"
"Nah. It was way cool, but my D'Artagnan fantasy was shortlived, kind of faded after the duel and all. . . Don't you think," he added, fearing he sounded like an ageing hippie to this child, "that the word 'cool' has become the new 'nice'? Everyone uses it, and thinks they shouldn't ought to."
"Pedants think it should only be applied in its proper original sense."
"Like that guy in Northanger Abbey, fighting against the tide."
"Oh yes. But what is the proper original sense of 'cool'?"
As if he would know. Spence cleared his throat. "I've heard it's a Yoruba term, translated into English, originally meaning something quite serious: a state of inner balance, poise, and right measure." He had a feeling he ought to cut this short and go find Anna. He compromised by hooking Jake out of a passing storm of midgets and introducing him to the lady who had drawn Shere Khan so splendidly. Jake preferred his own portraits of the gallant captain and her crew. He sidled, and wouldn't stay.
"I've seen you with Jake before," confessed Meret. "And his mother, if that's who it is taking him to school when you don't. My two oldest go to the same school. Florrie is in the other kindergarten class; it's her first term as well. My oldest, Tomkin, is in Year Two. Jake is such a beautiful little boy. . . Er, he's adopted?"
"No," said Spence, grinning. "It's me. I have, or had, a black granddaddy."
She blushed like a rose.
The tall guy in the green trousers had come over and stood by her side. "Spence? It is Spence, isn't it?"
The half-recognized profile and the name slotted together. Craft. Oh, fuck... It was Charles Craft: thin and prosperous and much improved. They discovered that they were practically neighbors. Charles had his own Gene-Mod nursery company called Natural Craft. Meret, like Spence, worked at home. What a coincidence! Anna and Spence must come to supper; they must fix a date. Charles was keen, Meret was keen. Anna, when she was tracked down and presented with this coincidence accompli, went into Anna-reticent mode, but was obliged to be reticently keen.
* * *
Anna had known that Charles Craft was still in Bournemouth. He had been born around here; he had a right. She'd known about Natural Craft, the family business regenerated. When she had spotted him picking up his wife and two red-headed children outside Jake's school, she'd felt doomed. She'd been praying ever since that she would never be spotted herself. But if his wife was Spence's illustrator, she would have to accept her fate.
They had to hire a babysitter for the supper date, an unusual extravagance.
"And I must say," grumbled Anna, "It is galling to think we are paying good money to spend an evening with Charles Craft!"
Spence raised his eyebrows. "I thought you and he used to be kinda close, at one time."
"Don't you believe it. Enforced team-mates, was all."
"I never liked him much myself, back then. But he's probably changed."
"Have you changed?"
Spence looked into the mirror opposite their bed. Spence looked out. His hair was longer than when he'd been an undergraduate, shorter than when he'd worn dreads. His bones were more visible; his skin was still inclined to break out. He rubbed a little concealer into the oily pores around his nose, touched up his eyebrows lightly: "No."
"Well, there you are. People don't."
"Okay, possibly he's a bit of a shit, but we have to have some kind of social life. You can't restrict yourself to only knowing the few people you totally like and trust, Anna."
"I don't see why not," said Anna Anaconda.
The Crafts lived with Meret's parents, a filial and ecologically sound arrangement that had to command respect. The big, double-fronted house, which was called The Rectory, was full of paintings by Meret's father, nudes and gaudy landscapes in a sugary, photo-realist style that had been fashionable in the sixties. Godfrey was very old, a craggy shambling wreck. Meret's mother, Isobel, was much younger, and didn't seem to be the woman featured in the pictures; perhaps that was a previous wife. She had a rather unnerving manner: a wandering glance and a constant, affectless smile. The other guests were Alice and Ken Oguma from the university, a tv journalist called Noelle Seger with her partner, and a something-in-the-city with his graphic-designer wife. Everyone looked sleek and smart, and it was indefinably clear that no one knew the Crafts particularly well. This was reassuring for Anna. A formal dinner party, a collection of near-strangers gathered together to impress each other, was something Spence detested.
She felt worse when she found herself placed next to Charles.
"Well, Anna," he said, at once. "I never thought you'd have gone in for babypharming. I'd have thought you would have disapproved. I've been following your career with interest, as they say. You've been getting famous, while I've been plugging away at i
mproving the vegetables." He glanced at her, slyly. "When did you get your eyes fixed?"
"My eyes? Oh, that. I had it done in China, ages ago."
"China, eh? Been there, done that. . . What kind of job do they do in China? I guess you're looking at about five-ten years, before you need them fixed again. That's the trouble with cosmetic surgery, once you've started you can't stop."
"The operation I had is supposed to be permanent."
"Well good luck. . . I read your paper, the Sans-serif one that caught so much flak. Very accomplished, considering where you were working. It must have been a blow when Parentis crashed."
"Not really."
"They backed the wrong horse," Mr Something-in-the-City, who had been introduced as Darth, chimed in knowledgeably. "Priced themselves out of the market."
"Invested too heavily in their way-out pure researchers," Charles grinned at Anna.
"What happened to Parentis, really?" asked Noelle Seger, leaning across the table. "Please tell me, I'm genuinely interested. They were among the hot pioneers, doing amazing things, and then. . . It must have been so exciting, working for them."
"What, unmh Darth, said, more or less." Anna smiled at Mr Something, wondering if that was scifi-fan parents or something ethnic from Uzbekistan. "They backed the wrong horse. There were two ways to go in human assisted reproduction. You optimized, or you selected. Parentis went for optimization, which is classier and preserves, well, all kinds of things. Selection, where you screen a portfolio of cloned embryonic cell masses, pick the obvious winner, and dump the rest, is far cheaper. When HAR became mass market, relatively anyway, there was a price war, and firms like Parentis were in trouble. But they haven't disappeared. They've just become very much smaller, and very, very expensive."
"Selection is not only cheaper," said Darth, "it's more natural, isn't it?"
"In a sense. But it's crude and rough. By optimizing, you preserve the net diversity—"
"Otherwise we'd all end up looking like perfect quarter-pounders!" laughed Noelle. "But Anna that sounds so horrible, when you talk about cell masses—"
"It all sounds horrible to me," remarked Isobel. "I hate to think of what Charles does to his poor vegetables. It's awfully arrogant, I think, trying to improve on nature."
"Ah, but you eat them, belle-mère." Charles raised his voice. "Anyone who objects to genetically modified foodstuffs, better speak now, by the way!"
"We can't stop him from bringing his work home," rumbled Godfrey. "The potatoes, the maize, the tomatoes, the broad beans, the spinach, where will it end. You should see his spinach seeds, it's like something from another planet, like a pollen or a virus in gross magnification, all spikes, knobs, and knuckles."
"That's nothing to do with transgenics, Godfrey," said Charles, tetchily. "They always looked like that."
A small, middle-aged woman, in black with a white apron, cleared the first course. Charles stood up to carve the saddle of mutton, which she brought to him on a trolley.
"But Anna, this TY phenomenon. Do you really think human sexual identity is being jerked around by a virus? Should we be afraid?"
"I don't know much about sexual identity. I'm interested in the viroid and the implications of finding a lateral transfer on that scale."
"Oh come on. Admit it; you love the gender-bending angle. You always were a bit of a tomboy." He looked down the length of the table, with its crowd of gleaming glassware and silver glinting in the light of many candles. "How do you feel about all this, Spence? Isn't it frightening, living with this female Dr Frankenstein?"
"Doesn't bother me," said Spence, helping himself to GM sag alu. He was glad he'd been placed as far from Charles as possible, but he wished Anna wasn't getting such a pasting. She wouldn't want to come here again, and he would lose a harmless pleasure. The gentle, graceful profile of his hostess framed by the smooth curve of red gold hair. "As long as she hands over her paypacket at the end of the month, I'll have her slippers warming and dinner on the table."
There was a general laugh.
Charles sat down, having divided the meat with aplomb, "But have you let her take a little cheek-scraping, or a sperm sample, for analysis? And are you really a New Man?"
"Nah. I don't believe in that stuff, it's pure superstition. If I want to know my fortune, I read the horoscopes. Sun in Aquarius, Aries rising, Jupiter in Aries, Moon in Libra. I'm a good team worker."
Meret hated dinner parties. The hired servants intimidated her, she could never think of anything to say, and Charles was always in his tetchiest mood—although it was his idea to have things so formal. Spence's scary wife could probably run a dinner party in her sleep and do all the cooking as well. You could see at a glance that she'd never stuffed anything behind the sofa cushions in her life. When Charles started needling Anna she felt near to panic, afraid there would be a stand-up row, that Spence's wife would storm out and he'd have to go with her, but luckily it passed off. Meret relaxed again and resumed the painful pleasure of secretly watching Spence. He looked so out of place and so relaxed, a woodland faun at the dinner table, with mischievous grey eyes, half human, half lazy animal. She realized sadly, something she'd only suspected until tonight: she had fallen in love.
Spence had often teased Anna about having a career in sex science and an aversion to sexual politics, which was a cheek considering the way he bitched about Ramone. But why did she recoil, why did she so hate to have that subject raised? The rational explanation involved pointing out the absurdity of all ideological squabbles and how it's never, ever that simple. The short answer might be Charles Craft. What does it mean, the horrible passivity that overtakes a woman, when a man she knows lays hands on her against her will? Attack is easy to assimilate, much easier than betrayal... Why does the memory of something like that, really not your fault, linger with so much shame, so much revulsion? Was she envious of Charles's success? There was no sense in feeling robbed: it was all water under the bridge, and anyway she didn't want a new BMW, or an opulent dinner service, three different sets of wine glasses for ten people, my God. . .There was nothing to be done, because she could not bear to explain to Spence why she didn't want to mix with the Crafts. It was too stupid, too long ago, too embarrassing and pathetic. She'd just have to hope that the difference between the two families' incomes kept them apart.
* * *
It was the football (soccer) season. Football practice should be Anna's job, Spence felt, coming from Manchester the way she did; but she rarely managed to be free on Sunday mornings. As Spence had understood from the start, "point six" meant the salary, not the work, which filled her every mortal hour, 24/7, my God. So it was Spence who took Jake along to the park and huddled with the other parents on the touch line, the usual suspects: known by first name only, qualified by the names of their children, Rick-Wanni's-Dad, Delilah-Trev's-Mum (except that now Spence knew Meret Craft personally). Delilah was distressed because she'd had to give up breastfeeding her ten-week-old baby. She'd had mastitis; she'd recovered, but the baby now preferred her bottle. That was why she was here alone, cheering on Trev, the eldest boy. She couldn't stand the sight of Caress sucking from a rubber tit and Ben (her old man) so fucking smug about it... Meret had nursed Tomkin until he was three and Florrie for a year. She was supposed to have stopped with Charlie, who was eighteen months, because Charles insisted, but she still (she admitted) sneaked a feed into the bedtime routine, it was so lovely and so much easier.
"I can't imagine your Charles wielding a formula bottle," said Rick.
"Charles is all right," said Meret. "You'd be surprised. He's the one who insisted they go to ordinary school, instead of private. My father thinks it's crazy." She was self-conscious about Charles, who could seem brusque and arrogant, and often felt she had to defend him by citing technical virtues (e.g., his voting habits).
Spence stood beside Meret, smiling vaguely, wishing he could tackle the breast-feeding topic with Rick's fearless aplomb. When the rain began, Delilah an
d the other women, along with Rick and Dennis, another male-soccer-mom, took off at a jog for the pavilion, Rick wearing his latest offspring strapped on his chest, inside his jacket but facing outwards, which Spence thought weird.
It was half time. Andrew, the coach, loped purposefully towards Meret and Spence.
"Spence, we need a linesman for the second half. Could you—?"
"It would be an honor. But you know, I don't properly understand the offside rule."
Many of the tots were not yet six years old, none of them were more than eight, but this was serious. Andrew nodded grimly and loped on with a worried frown. The rain had turned to icy hail. Meret and Spence walked along the line, changing ends. She looked up with her charming three-cornered smile. "Spence, I don't think you want to understand the offside rule."
"Gee, Meret, how could you imagine that?"
She giggled. "Did Anna breastfeed?"
"She tried, but she was working and traveling a lot. She used to express and leave me to administer the bottles. We switched to formula at three months, I seem to remember."
"Poor Anna. I love it. I'll be heartbroken when Charlie doesn't want me any more."
"It's a bitch to lose them. They change so fast."
"Every hour of every day. It is hell looking after children, sheer hell, but I can't bear to think it has to come to an end. My life will be a complete blank."
Gwyneth Jones - Life(2005) Page 30
