A Judgement on a Life

by Stephen Baddeley

  So, I wanted Tom’s baby. Having his baby would change things, for all of us. Most of the things it would change would be good things, good for me, but not all the things that changed would be good things, not for everyone, not for Annie. I knew I had to talk to Annie.

  When I talked to Annie, I talked about what I wanted, and what I feared. What I wanted for myself, and what I feared for her. Then she gave me that funny look she has. It was the look that frightened me when I first saw it, and it was the look Tom called ‘the Aristotle’.

  “Let’s talk to Tommy,” she said.

  “Would he want me to have another baby… our baby?” She took hold of my hair and lifted up my head.

  “Stop being a stupid little nigger girl.” She went over and picked up the phone. She rang Tom at the Trust. She told him to meet us at the Sailing Club.

  Thirty-One

  When an application came in to us, to the Trust, I would first discuss it with Tom and then, if he was happy for us to do so, we would investigate it. We would investigate the applicant and the reason, or reasons, for the application, and what benefit might accrue, and to whom, and in what way, from any donation or investment we, the Trust, might make. The applicants were usually institutions, but occasionally individuals. We investigated them as thoroughly as we could, in the knowledge that the moneys from the Trust must go, and must be seen to go, to worthy causes. We were becoming a well-recognized philanthropic entity, and both Tom and I were keen to project a clean and benevolent image. We were nowhere near being as big as some of the larger US and British foundations. We weren’t Rockefellers, Welcomes or Fords, or the Gates’ of the future, but we were up there high in the middle rank, and our public image was important to both of us.

  From a purely financial standpoint, it was important that we retain our tax deductible, charitable status. I knew Tom didn’t really care about that, but for me it was important that we not lose money unnecessarily. It was the way I was brought up to be and I have no apologies for being like that. Because you have billions doesn’t mean you should stop caring about thousands. Over the years, I hope, and I think, I’ve brought Tom round to my way of thinking.

  So what Mr Munroe had to tell us came as something of a surprise.

  You may have gathered that I am known as a rather unemotional person and, I suppose, in many ways I am, so when I just wrote ‘something of a surprise’, I really meant a ‘fucking bombshell’, although I would never say that, of course.

  Thirty-Two

  I liked the idea. I liked the idea of another baby. Ambrosia’s baby. I worried about Annie. I knew she wanted Ambrosia to have her own baby. She said it would bind us together. Bind us tighter than before. She said she wished she could have Ambrosia’s baby for her. To return the favour of the borrowed womb. She laughed as she said that, but I knew it wasn’t easy for her to say it, and to say it with a happy voice. She was a wonderful actress, but I knew her well. I knew her acting style. She didn’t smile inside.

  Ambrosia was simple. We knew her. We thought we knew her. We thought we knew her better than she knew herself. But we didn’t. Not by a long way. We were wrong. That comes later. Life can be full of surprises. Some surprises are big.

  Before I met Annie, I knew almost nothing. Nothing about human emotions, any emotions. Maybe a bit about dogs’ emotions. I knew Mother loved me. I loved her. I knew Father hated me. I hated him. That was all I knew about human emotions. It was simple. It was all I knew. With Annie came complexity. She taught me about complex things. Things I never knew about before. I learned the complexity of what people think and what people feel. What they can think and feel about themselves. What they can think about other people. What they feel about other people. That love is not a single thing. That love is not a simple thing. That love can be destroyed. I learned about that later. She didn’t teach me about that. I learned it for myself.

  So, we left the Sailing Club. We were resolved. Ambrosia would stop the tablets. We would have another baby. Ambrosia drove the Jeep home. Annie came with me. I held her hand. We didn’t talk. Not until we stopped at lights.

  “You OK with this?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes, why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Well, having the girls was a joint effort, you know, all three of us. This will be just Ambrosia and me.”

  “So what? I can live with that. I’m not that brittle.”

  I knew that. She was the least brittle person I ever met. That’s what I thought. She was the most malleable person I ever met. That’s what I thought. There was nothing porcelain about her. There was nothing brittle, nothing transparent. She was copper. She was opaque, malleable and a good conductor. She conducted me through life. She was my Virgil. That’s what I thought.

  As we pulled into home, she said, “I’ll help breastfeed him. Like with the girls.”

  “How do you know it’ll be a boy?”

  “I don’t, but it will.”

  “How do you know it won’t be twins?”

  “I don’t, but it won’t.”

  “Sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “What about that colostrum stuff, won’t he need that?”

  “He’ll get Brosie’s, only lasts four days anyway.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Looked it up.”

  “When?”

  “Last week.”

  So, what was going on? They told me they only discussed it that morning. That they didn’t discuss it before. She looked it up, last week. Why would she do that?

  She would only look it up if she knew what was going to happen. Only if she could read the future. Only if she could read Ambrosia’s mind. How do women do that? I wish I could do that. It’s like they have a crystal ball inside their heads.

  “Does Brosie know you looked it up?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did you?”

  “I know what Brosie wants and if you had one tenth of a functioning chromosome inside that smart, map-reading brain of yours, you’d know it too… She wants your baby and she wants it more than any of us has ever wanted anything.”

  “When did she tell you that?”

  “She didn’t.”

  “When did you find out?”

  “Find out? I didn’t have to find out. I knew. I knew from the first time you two met. You know, that time she came to dinner. From that first time. Remember?”

  “So… that long ago?”

  “Jesus wept… Men.” She wasn’t religious.

  So we talked it through. We talked it through until midnight. We lay in the dark as we talked it through. We could hear the waves in the distance and the call of the night-curlews. They lay with their heads on my chest. We talked until we fell asleep.

  Ambrosia would stop the tablets. Dr Helen would see her. Dr Helen would make sure everything was alright for us to have another baby. Annie would help with the feeding. I would get back to the Avery Method, the way to get Annie making milk. (Google it.) It would be no hardship. It wasn’t before. It wouldn’t be again. (If you Googled it, you’ll know why.)

  He would be bound to Annie by her smell and to Ambrosia by his genes. To me by his genes.

  We went to sleep. That part of our lives was sorted. It was all good.

  There were other parts of our lives that weren’t sorted. There were parts of our lives about to be ‘unsorted’. Parts that weren’t ‘all good’.

  We walked the beach before dawn. We held hands. Ambrosia was in the middle. We didn’t talk. We didn’t need to talk. A big thing was happening. We didn’t know where it was taking us. Not even Annie, and she knew everything. Almost everything. Everything important. Well, I thought she did. Everyone can be wrong about things. I was wrong about that. She didn’t know any more than I did. Not about the big thing that was about to
happen. Not about the bad thing.

  Thirty-Three

  “Fuck.” I didn’t often swear. “How the fuck did this happen?”

  “I’m not sure,” said J. Maz. J. Maz never swore. “I thought we’d checked out all these applicants as thoroughly as possible. I don’t know how all this slipped through the net. It could be a little embarrassing for us.”

  That was the fucking understatement of the year.

  Thirty-Four

  I’ve always enjoyed sex, right back from my school days and uni days and you may know that already. If you don’t, you haven’t been paying attention. I enjoy the pleasure I get and, perhaps even more, the pleasure I give. That’s it, nothing more. Sex is for pleasure, full stop, period, whatever.

  There was no biological function to sex, not for me, not after the hysterectomy. I would never have children, could never have children, and I knew I had no part to play in the history of the future. Well, I thought that was how it was going to be, until Ambrosia came along. When Tommy forgave me for what I’d done to him, and when he told me he wanted to marry me, and how he’d worked things out from the things he’d read and how we were going to have our own children, and how we were going to manage it, and how we were going to have twins, and how they weren’t going to be identical twins, because the doctors could, and eventually would, suck two eggs out of my remaining ovary. He told me how they could, and eventually would, suck out the eggs, mix them in a test-tube with his sperm and then put them into Ambrosia’s womb.

  He had it all worked out, and told me all about what was going to happen. That was the day he came to see me in Sydney, the day we saw one another for the first time in a year, the day he said all the bad times were over and how we had to start again, not from the beginning, but from somewhere after that, from somewhere in the middle, from the time of the party, from the time when I left him and took the Munch to Peter; from that time.

  But now, this was going to be different. When Tommy and I made love it would be the same as it always was, for pleasure and for nothing else. But when Ambrosia went off the tablets, and then, when Tommy and Ambrosia made love, it would be for something more than pleasure. It would be for the creation of life and, if they did that, it would be a wonderful thing. Creating life, and the pleasure of creating life, is what life is all about, and I knew that, in an abstract sort of way, even though, in reality, I knew it in a concrete sort of way.

  Anyone who says life’s more than about creating the next lot of life, is selling us a lie. A lie about God: that there is a God.

  It can be an uncomfortable thought, for some people, that life has no higher purpose than to recreate itself. The truth isn’t always comfortable. Believing in the lie of God and the lie of higher purposes doesn’t make sense. It never has made sense to me and wouldn’t to anyone with half a brain who thought about it.

  Having sex makes us feel good, more than good, and that’s not really surprising, is it? Sex makes us feel good and that makes us want to do it again, and again, and as often as we can. It’s the good feeling sex gives us that ensures our DNA will keep on going. If sex didn’t give us that good feeling, then we’d be finished as a species. There aren’t seven, or is it eight now, billion people on the planet because sex is no better than a peanut butter sandwich. Thank God for sex, thank God we’re not giant pandas, and thank god I’m not religious.

  Tommy and Ambrosia were setting out to make a baby, a child, a person, someone for the future, a future the three of us would never see, well, not all of it. Perhaps a future we might not want to see, well, not all of it. It was Tommy who said the future might not be something we wanted to see, not all of it. He’s a historian and, sometimes, the future frightens him. He’s happier in the past, as long as it’s not his own.

  Now, the real now, the now of when I’m writing this, Tommy can be a grumpy-old-man. But, as he would say, “Not often. Just sometimes. Not a lot. Just a bit.” Most of the time, he’s optimistic about the future, in that pessimistic sort of way he has. But, just sometimes, he’s not, because, just sometimes, he can be pessimistic in that pessimistic sort of way he has. It seems to have got worse as he’s got older, and I think it got worse when the girls left home and went off to uni. I know he missed them a lot when they first left. It wasn’t so bad when they went away to school, because we were up and down to Sydney all the time and we never went for long without seeing them. But now they’re older and off at uni and we feel we should leave them to get on with their own lives, and that it would be wrong if we were always around. We want to be good parents and sometimes being a good parent means getting out of the way. Ambrosia put it well when she said, in her best hamming-it-up sort of Caribbean way, “We gotta be a’getin de hell out’a dese young ladies’ lives, or dey is never gonna be a’forgivin’ us.” Ambrosia pretended to be a stupid black girl, when she did her eyeball-rolling-darkie, hamming-it-up act, but she was always wise, in a folksy sort of way.

  (When Megan, from NY Book Editors sent me her opinions on the first draft, she said I should think about deleting that stuff about the girls going off to uni. She thought it might give away too much about a happy ending. I thought about that for a while. But we all know there’s going to be a ‘sort of’ happy ending, eventually, don’t we? That’s why I’m leaving it in.)

  I don’t know where Tommy gets his episodes of pessimism from. It wouldn’t be from his mother. His mother sounds like a lovely, optimistic person. I wish I’d met her. It wouldn’t be from his father either. He never learned anything from his father. Perhaps how to hate. Tommy was good at hating and always has been, but I’m not so sure he is now.

  He hated me once, or thought he did, and then discovered that he didn’t. Ambrosia and Pip told him he didn’t and in the end they convinced him, so in the end he believed them, and then, when he came to see me, I convinced him too. I convinced him three times in the first hour and then all night. By morning, we both knew he’d never hated me at all.

  So, back to the then.

  Watching Ambrosia, as Tommy made love to her, gave me a strange feeling. I don’t think it was jealousy, but I knew it was something close. What they were doing was what people were doing all over the world, and what people were doing back before history began, back before the first plant was planted and the first sheep shepherded. The primordial act of making life. They were doing something I could never do.

  I’d been part of making life. The girls were me, half of me. They were us, half of each of us, but they weren’t made inside me. They were made inside some glass tube, made in a laboratory, and then planted into a womb that wasn’t mine, the womb of another woman. That never worried me much, not then. I knew how lucky we’d been, and especially how lucky I’d been.

  But watching Tommy and Ambrosia gave me a feeling I didn’t like. What they were doing was something special. Something I would never experience. Something special between two people who were about to make life. I knew it was something special for Ambrosia, because I knew what she wanted, and what she needed. She needed Tommy’s baby as much as she ever needed anything.

  I pretended, to myself most of all, that I wasn’t jealous, but I was, in that funny sort of way that jealousy has of hiding behind the other things we feel. I’ve never thought of myself as a jealous person, but I can be, just as much as any other person can be. I never thought of myself as a jealous person, because I never had reason to be one. No one ever had more than me, and there was no one to be jealous of, not until then.

  At uni, when I missed out on being Portia in The Merchant, I wasn’t jealous. I wasn’t jealous of the girl who got it, because there were too many other emotions to contend with. There was disappointment in flashing neon lights, shame in red-hot coals, shock-horror, betrayal by my ‘stars’. The unthinkableness of not getting the part I wanted, and thought I should have got, and should have got, because I wanted it. It was a bad time for me, but that afternoon Harry took me to l
unch in Manly and then took me back to his room at college and devirginized me. He did that because I’d asked him to. Harry was a gentleman, even though he played the viola, and I don’t think he would have done it, not if I hadn’t asked him to. So, even the cloud of not being Portia had some sort of a silver lining, and whatever clouds you get in your life, and whatever sort of lining you’re expecting, it may not be as bad, or as good, as the one you get.

  So, I was jealous of Ambrosia, in a funny sort of way. I couldn’t help it. I knew, as I lay by their sides and watched them make love, that there was something between them that I would never have. The making of a baby, even the expectation of making a baby, even the expectation of perhaps, maybe, making a baby. When Tommy made love to me, it was for all the pleasure I could give him. When he made love to Ambrosia, it was for all of that too, but for something else too, for something more too. I was jealous of the ‘something else’ and the ‘something more’.

  I could live with it, because I had to live with it, I had no choice. I knew they both cared for me and would never do anything to hurt me, or to make me feel excluded, but I did, though. I felt jealous and I felt lonely. They weren’t nice things to be feeling, so, I suppose I became depressed.

  And, because I was jealous, and because I was depressed, when Tommy made love to me, I tried too hard. I wanted to give him what Ambrosia couldn’t. She could give him a baby, but she couldn’t give him the pleasures I could. So I tried too hard and made a mess of it. Instead of giving him something special I gave him something forced, contrived and artificial. I gave him what a prostitute would give him, and he knew it.

  Thirty-Five