by Tony Parsons
‘It can’t be like it was before. When we could make love when we felt like it. You don’t understand, Paulo. If I don’t have a kid, then what’s the point of me?’
‘The point of you? If you never have a kid, you’re still beautiful. You’re still smart, and kind, and sexy.’
‘I’m not sexy.’
‘Yes, you are, you sexy little bitch.’ They were both smiling now. ‘I know you want a kid, Jess. So let’s go for the IVF. And if it doesn’t work, let’s try again. And again. And if we have to sell everything to keep trying, then we’ll do it.’
She placed a hand on his upper arm and squeezed it, massaging the curve of the muscle, feeling the bone beneath. This was the man she wanted to be with for the rest of her life.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘But if it doesn’t happen, if it never happens, then let’s not stop loving each other. Because I couldn’t stand that.’
‘Me neither.’
‘I promise you we’ll spend every penny we have on the IVF thing, but I want you to promise me something.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That once in a while, just every once in a while, we will stop thinking about all this baby stuff and make love not because we want a baby, but because we still fancy each other.’
Her smile was broader.
‘I promise.’
So they kissed for a while and then took off their clothes and she put on her high-heeled Jimmy Choo shoes – her husband was a very conventional man, and she knew how much he liked high heels in the bedroom – and then they stood up, positioning the wardrobe door just right so that they could see themselves in its full-length mirror.
And that was the night that Jessica and Paulo made their baby.
Eight
Jack Jewell was still recognised.
All the Fish in the Sea had ended ten years ago, but he had never stopped working and there had been enough roles on television – the retiring cop forced to work with the reckless rookie, the gentleman jewel thief swindling the gullible widow, the private dick with exquisite table manners and Sherlock Holmes tendencies – for it to cause a minor stir when he walked into a restaurant in Chinatown.
Today he didn’t notice the double takes, the affectionate smiles, the startled murmurs of ‘Isn’t that…?’
Today all he saw was his daughters.
He was so proud of them. They were so beautiful, they had always been so beautiful, and he was the one person in the world who could see on the women they’d become the imprint of the children they had once been.
Megan, pretty and round, as if she was made up of circles (he knew she worried about her weight, but she was always gorgeous to him). Jessica, the conventional beauty, with her lush black hair, compact frame and baby face (he could understand why people thought she was the youngest, and smiled when he remembered how that used to drive her crazy). And Cat, his darling Cat, tall and slim, all arms and legs, with those wide-set brown eyes that seemed to see right through you.
What was the old song? Something about when you are the father of boys you worry, and when you are the father of girls you pray. He was never worried about them, the girls, but only what men – his lying, cunning, cheating tribe – would do to them. But now he felt that it was all going to work out fine.
He liked to joke about what a trial they had been, but it was the defence mechanism of a man who felt he hadn’t been there often enough for the children in his sole charge. He loved them more than he loved anything in his life. But he knew that the hard work, the day-to-day drudgery and graft, had been mostly done by Cat and a series of hired hands from the poorer parts of the globe.
‘So you’re their mother and their father,’ women would say to him when the girls were growing up.
But he had never been a mother to them. A man doesn’t become a mother just because the mother is not around. He hadn’t even been a good enough father.
It would be different today. Men were different. More capable of taking on different roles. But back then, in the mid-seventies when Olivia walked away, Jack had been typecast as an old-fashioned kind of father. Designed to go out into the world and make a living while his children were brought up by someone else. A parade of long-forgotten nannies, au pairs, housekeepers and, above all, his oldest daughter.
Jack Jewell had been too busy earning a living to always be there for Megan, Jessica and Cat. But it was more than the demands of work. Unlike his ex-wife, and unlike most actors, Jack had never had years of resting. There had always been a market for his well-mannered decency, his old-world charm. ‘David Niven lite’, one critic called it, trying to be unkind, but Jack had taken it as a compliment. Sometimes he took jobs not because they needed the money but because he needed the self-esteem and sense of worth that came from making his mark in the working world.
When Olivia left him, his sense of self had taken a terrible blow. He thought less of himself as a man when she walked out. The only way he could recover his sense of self was through work, and by taking to bed the women that work brought his way.
Helping Cat with her homework, taking Jessica to ballet class, teaching Megan to dress herself – these things would not have helped Jack Jewell put himself back together. He needed his work. It was so much easier to make a success of your career than your marriage.
And now two of his children were to have children of their own. The news filled him with nothing but happiness. It seemed to Jack that grandchildren would put stabilisers on their little family, and ensure its survival.
What stability had he given his daughters? He was there in theory, the sole carer. In practice he was constantly on set, or attending to his needs with some love-struck make-up girl or recent graduate from RADA. To his buried but abiding shame, Jack Jewell knew that he didn’t have it in him to be a full-time parent. It would have driven him insane. But perhaps – no, definitely – even back then he could have struck a healthier balance between home and work. There were jobs he could have resisted, women he could have walked away from. And gone home early to his three daughters. It was too late now. Thank heavens it had worked out all right in the end. He knew that Megan and Jessica would make good mothers. Megan was smart and tough. Jessica was loving and kind. They would be everything that their own mother had not been.
If he had been sometimes preoccupied by work, and distracted by starlets, then Olivia had been something worse. From the moment she left, it was as if she wanted no reminders of her old life. Contact was sporadic, and then almost non-existent. The children, it seemed to Jack, were expected to make all the effort. Olivia made none. She had more important things to consider – the struggle with her weight, her botched second face-lift, and again and again the man of her dreams turning out to be a lazy, freeloading loser.
Jack had known plenty of fathers who had behaved that way to their first family. Olivia proved that a mother could be just as cruel and pitiless. A barnyard animal would not have been so callous to its offspring.
Jack could never explain such wanton malice to his children, and neither could he articulate his own feelings about how he had failed them as a father. He could hardly explain these things to himself.
Bloody actors, Jack thought. No good to anyone without a script.
Megan always told her patients that pregnancy was a bit like flying. Take-off and landing. They were the tough parts. If things were going to go wrong, that’s when it usually happened.
When the three of them sat down with their father in their favourite restaurant in Chinatown, Jessica was in – what? Week four? Most women wouldn’t even know they were pregnant by then. Most women would be looking at the calendar and starting to think, funny that. A bit late. Or perhaps most of them wouldn’t even notice that their cycle was a bit out.
Unless of course they were waiting. Unless they were trying, and had been trying for a long time.
‘You’re going to be a grandfather,’ Jessica said again, laughing with delight. ‘Twice over, Dad. Can
you handle it?’
‘They can’t be any harder than you three.’ He smiled, embracing Jessica. ‘And at least at the end of the day I’ll be able to give them back. Congratulations, darling. I know how much you wanted this. You and Paulo.’
Then he attempted to do the same to Megan, but it was much more awkward because she was holding a spring roll with her chopsticks, and she didn’t have a partner, and she nearly stabbed him in the eye.
‘Well done, darling,’ he said, and Megan felt as if she had just got another A+ in another exam.
Megan smiled. Dear old Dad. Week four and week twelve was all the same to him. But it wasn’t the same to her. During take-off and landing a few short weeks could be the difference between life and no life at all.
For like all doctors, Megan counted pregnancy in weeks. It was only the rest of the world that counted in months.
Megan thought, oh Jessie, week four; it’s far too soon to be telling people. But nothing in this world could stop Jessica blurting out her news. She had waited so long. And it was hard to urge caution in the face of such unbridled joy.
Megan hugged her sister and congratulated her, but in her heart she thought, the plane is still on the runway. And anything could happen.
‘It was a Sunday morning,’ Jessica told their father. ‘Paulo had been for a run. And when he came back, I was sitting on the stairs. He looked at my face. And he just knew.’
And there was something else. On some level of sibling rivalry, Megan knew she was jealous.
She was happy for Jessica. She couldn’t have been happier. But Jessie had her husband and her house and her life. And, yes, the ring on her finger. Their father had walked Jess down the aisle – given her away, as they say. There was Paulo to go running on a Sunday morning and to come back home and hear the good news and to cuddle Jessica at night.
Megan thought – I have no Paulo, no ring, and no room in my flat for a little pink or blue nursery. All I’ve got is the bun in the oven and a rented room in Hackney.
Megan was in week twelve while Jessica was in week four or five. Megan had just sailed through her nuchal scan – there were no chromosomal abnormalities, there was no risk of Down’s syndrome. The heartbeat was strong and steady, the baby looked normal and happy. The date Megan had been given seemed more real with every passing day. This is your captain speaking. We have lift-off. You may unfasten your seat belts and wander about the cabin. You are definitely going to have a baby.
Jessica was still a couple of months away from a nuchal scan. Megan didn’t think her sister had any comprehension of how momentous that test would be, or how awful that paralysing wait when you hold your breath until they give you the odds of Down’s syndrome. Less than 300 to one and you needed further examination – an invasive test, they called it, to find out if the baby was really likely to be disabled or not.
But this was the heartbreaker – an invasive test, an injection into the baby’s neck, could kill a healthy baby. If the bookies of the medical profession gave you odds of less than 300 to one, did you go for an invasive test, and risk killing a healthy baby? Or did you take the risk of disability? And how could anyone ever make those choices about something as innocent and defenceless as their unborn baby, and know for certain that they were doing the right thing?
Megan was over that particular hurdle. If there were others, they were likely to occur nearer to the date they had given her. During landing.
At week twelve Megan’s foetus was undeniably human. On the scan it – Megan still thought of this thing growing inside her as it, although the he or she had already been genetically programmed – could be seen crossing its legs and wiggling its fingers. The head was enormous – almost half of Little It was taken up by that great bulging bonce, nodding forward as if it was far too heavy to hold up – and, incredibly, unbelievably, Little It seemed to be sucking a thumb. Little It was around eight centimetres long and weighed in at eighteen grams.
At week four, Jessica’s foetus was still too small to see without a magnifying glass – about a fifth of a millimetre long. Was it even a real baby yet? It was to Jessica.
‘Paulo’s going to tear out his study,’ Jessica said. ‘Just throw it all out and turn it into a nursery. He has started already. All the shelves have gone. It’s going to be the most beautiful nursery in the world.’
Although her condition still seemed slightly unreal, the doctor in Megan knew that nothing much could stop her baby being born now, while Jessica’s baby was still fighting for its life.
And yet here was the funny thing.
Somehow Jessica’s baby felt like the one whose future was secure.
Cat sipped her champagne. Only she and her father were drinking the bottle of Mumm that had been produced from the bottom of the Shenyang Tiger’s fridge. And as she watched her two pregnant sisters – Jessica spilling over with joy, Megan far more reserved, yet apparently happy that she taken the decision to have this baby – Cat knew that she had let her personal life drift.
Megan had a career and a baby on the way. Juggling the needs of both would be tough, but next year she would be a fully registered doctor and a mother. No matter how hard it got in Hackney, there was something enviable about a life so full.
And Jessica – Cat had never seen anyone so happy. She had the final piece of her jigsaw. The man, the marriage, the home – and now the baby. Cat was glad for her. Because she knew that for her sister, the rest of it would have grown sour and meaningless without a child.
Cat thought, what about me? What do I have? What will make next year any different from this year?
It was almost funny. She had always been completely ruthless in her professional life. Working hard, knowing when it was time to move on, finding a mentor in Brigitte, and then doing all she could to please her.
But in her private life Cat now felt she had been hopelessly passive, allowing herself to drift where the wind blew her. Cat liked to think of herself as an intelligent woman. But existing on automatic pilot – how stupid was that?
‘The next generation of Jewells is on the way,’ said their father, holding the hands of Jessica and Megan, but staring at Cat and lifting a wry eyebrow. ‘You’re next, Cat.’
‘Not me,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit more careful than they are.’
Rory – what was all that about? He was kind, attentive, and clearly mad about her. But Rory’s past wouldn’t lie down and die. It couldn’t. Not ever. Because there was a child involved. Because the ex-wife would always be there. Because of that stupid operation.
And as Cat watched her sisters with their father, she thought, what do I need to be happy? A job I love, a good flat, my own space. Children had never been on the list. And they were not on the list today. But perhaps she needed the possibility of children.
Even if Cat never had any of the little bastards, it would be nice to think she could if she really wanted to. If she ever changed her mind. That was the problem with Rory. She was not used to having her options limited.
Yet, as she sat listening to her sisters’ tales of fatigue, sickness and swollen breasts – and as she guessed at Megan’s fears of bringing a baby into a one-bedroom flat in Hackney – Cat felt a clearly identifiable emotion wash over her, and almost swooned with the force of it.
Relief.
Then suddenly Megan had to go. There were house visits to make on the Sunny View Estate before afternoon surgery. And Cat had to get back to Mamma-san. So they said their goodbyes on Gerrard Place, next to the long line of fire engines in Soho’s fire station.
Jack and Jessica lingered, both reluctant to go home. They drifted across to John Lewis and went up to the fifth floor, losing themselves among the prams, cots, push chairs, Grobags, babygros and many things they didn’t even recognise – tap protectors, bottle warmers, nappy wrappers, the products of an industry that had sprung up since Jack Jewell’s daughters were children.
They didn’t talk about it, but they both knew what they wished for Jessica’s bab
y, and for the baby that Megan was at this very moment carrying around the Sunny View Estate, and it was a wish that grew within the walls of every broken home.
A family that was built on far stronger ground than the one they had known.
Rory went to see Megan. She saw him in her surgery after hours, a small favour to her old martial arts teacher. Neither of them told Cat.
‘I had an operation. Towards the end of my marriage. You know. A vasectomy.’
Now she understood why he didn’t want to talk on the phone. This was a big thing in his life. You didn’t resolve it with a phone call.
‘I think my sister may have mentioned it.’
‘And now – well, I’m not sure it was the right thing to do. I mean, I knew I didn’t want any more children with my wife. Ex-wife. And she certainly didn’t want any more children with me. But perhaps it was too drastic.’
‘It’s a common problem.’
He was stunned.
‘It is?’
‘We’re good at controlling our reproduction. But not so good at controlling our personal lives.’
‘You mean you have seen this before?’
‘What? Regrets from a man who has had a vasectomy? More times than I can count. I’ve also seen women who are sterilised, and live to regret it.’
‘I thought perhaps – I don’t know – I was the only one. It sounds stupid when I say it like that.’
‘It’s not stupid. Nobody talks about these things. Because what does it say about you?’
‘That I am a complete idiot who has made a total mess of his life.’
‘That’s a bit harsh. I was going to say, it shows you have made one or two bad choices. Although I am sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. But how can I help you, Rory?’
‘I want to know if it’s possible to reverse what’s been done to me.’
Megan had seen it all before. Even with her limited experience in a surgery, this conversation was not new. Perhaps this is how you become a proper doctor, she thought – seeing the same scenarios of human pain and sadness and illness again and again, until your response became automatic. What was different this time was that this man was in love with her sister.