by Graham Swift
And he was a verifiable and practised father, if not the most shining example of paternity: two teenage kids. Just two cats now, apparently. What, incidentally, had he done with them, while we stole away to Sussex (Paris)? Just left them to fend for themselves?
Mike, back in Herne Hill, would have fixed himself a supper for one on a tray in front of the telly, then slept ignorantly alone—that is, if we don’t count a still fragile Otis curled up on a corner of the duvet. But then, at this time, the very same proposition would have been going through Mike’s head too: this primitive obstacle, this crude, unscientific bugbear to be overcome, that his wife, that Paula would have to do it, if not exactly at close-range or in hands-on fashion, with another man.
Oh lord. It rained that night too, though it had begun as a fine May day and finished with a balmy, hazy evening. Dinner in the “Akenhurst Room,” candlelit and oakpanelled, while the first drops began to patter, apologetically, on the terrace outside. He just wanted female company, a woman to share his bed? It had been a while, perhaps, and he’d had to go, or felt he had to, to this considerable trouble and expense. It was rather touching. I should have been flattered. I’d become special to him? He saw me as some replacement Mrs. Fraser? He was falling in love with me? God forbid.
I listened to more snippets from his troubled family life, and considered what I might tell him of mine: my late father’s divorces, for example, his three hapless marriages. And incidentally, he was a High Court judge. Switching subjects completely, I might have mentioned that Mike, whom by now, of course, Alan had met, used to work, before he worked on The Living World, on snails. Yes, snails. Perhaps Mike had mentioned them himself. But then if he had, surely Alan wouldn’t have chosen them (another serious mistake)—to eat. Escargots: they were on the Gifford’s distinctly Gallic menu, and Alan, as some Englishmen will, as a point almost of honour and bravado, went for them. Should I have said something?
To your dad and me, who’ll eat most things, they’ve always been strictly taboo.
And—thinking of things French—I thought, later that night, about that woman, in January, in Paris, where I was supposed to be right then. “That girl” I nearly called her. And the fact is I wanted to reach out protectively to her, standing there on that bridge in the wonderful cold light and perfectly happy as she was, to pull her collar up and tuck her scarf a little more snugly round her chin.
But hold on, you’ll be wondering: I had time to think, to contemplate, to conjure up such tender images, on this adventurous and plainly adulterous night, when thinking was hardly high on the agenda?
Yes, I had plenty. Without going into other details, my night with Alan Fraser ended up a little like now. I mean, absolutely not like now in one main respect, but in other respects, like it. It was even raining. The banal truth is that he fell asleep on me, and I stayed awake. There was dinner talk, there was preamble, there was even, I’m sure, during the thing itself, some gasping sex talk—but there was precious little pillow talk. I slept with him, I slept with our vet. I did all the things that that can mean. But, being strictly accurate, he slept with me before I slept with him, and I lay awake for a long while before I slept at all.
Perhaps I simply “satisfied” him. That’s not to claim credit. He simply crashed, sated, as men quite often ungraciously do (“men”: hark at me) into unconsciousness. He was the vet, but I put him to sleep. Not much pillow talk? Scarcely any, really—if I’d even wanted it.
I just lay awake, not particularly wishing to sleep, or even feeling ignored. Not even, I’ll be honest, assailed by feelings of guilt and remorse. Just thinking steadily to myself, as if I actually needed this sleeping stranger at my side to set my thoughts in motion.
Not unlike now. It’s an old and perennial situation, perhaps. You have it all to come, Kate. A woman does her best to be a lover, then, before she knows it, she becomes a mother, a sleeping charge beside her. But, of course, Mike here’s not a stranger. And when I was lying there beside Alan Fraser, I was thinking mainly of your father. It’s what I mean by comparison.
Oh how I love your father.
The room was on a first-floor corner, one of the best in the hotel. It actually had a four-poster bed. He’d forked out for the five-star Gifford Park and I’d been too polite or too amenable, if those are the right words, to protest. How much would it have cost him—just to fall asleep? I had the feeling that the place might have had some previous sentimental significance for him and I didn’t want to probe. And I was certainly too tactful or too compliant to broach its unsettling significance for me. Not so much the place itself (though now it has just such a significance), but the location. Did it have to be Sussex, and not so very far from the ancestral domains of the Hooks?
You see my dilemma? What am I to say, with barely a week now to go? “Cancel it?” Or, more preposterously: “Could it be some other hotel?” I have my excuse and my get-out, of course: you. You and my perfectly appropriate mother’s instinct. How can we possibly even consider our anniversary, even if it is our twenty-fifth, at such a time as this? How can we just go off so soon and leave our bruised and shaken nestlings all by themselves?
Have I brought you now fully up to speed?
And yet I can see all your dad’s reasons, all his needs and urgent contingency planning. It even makes sense: time for you to be alone, to think and talk it through. You’re not helpless babies. And it is our twenty-fifth. I can see how the Sussex thing works now: our territory. Only six miles or so from Birle and at least, for him, there’ll be that umbilical going off in that direction. And—with that direction in mind—what will Grannie Helen think if we don’t do something special for our special anniversary?
Suppose it’s the same room. Oh lord. Suppose (is it possible after seventeen years?) it’s even the same bed. Mike would have gone for the best, of course he would, no expense spared. He’ll have asked for the best—one of the reasons he booked so long in advance.
I can’t get out of it. I’ll just have to pretend, smile and pretend. Or treat it as some grotesque and appalling opportunity for confession. On top of everything else? Mikey, forgive me, forgive me. It was, believe me, all in a good cause.
The trouble is I know that he—which really means we—will put it to you. We’ll ask you to judge us tomorrow in all kinds of ways, but we’ll ask for your verdict on this tricky secondary matter. Namely whether you think it’s right that, at this particular, traumatic point in your lives, we should swan off to a five-star hotel, leaving you here with the contents of the fridge.
But my hunch is that you will give us your “permission.” I can’t put myself in your shoes, but that’s my hunch, or in one sense it’s my earnest hope, since that will mean that what’s about to occur tomorrow will have gone, so far as such a thing can, “well.” But in one respect your letting us go off like reprieved offenders to celebrate our wedding anniversary won’t help me at all.
I want it both ways. I want both to go and not to go to the Gifford Park. I want you to listen to these things I’m telling you and not to hear them at all. You see what I mean? Every twist and turn.
A corner room. I can’t remember the number. It’s just as well, perhaps. There were aquatints of Sussex scenes on the wall. A sepia photograph of some tweeded folk piled into a shooting brake. It had a fine view, through a latticed, wisteria-hung window, of those ever-suggestive Downs. And it had a chintz-hung four-poster bed with spiralled-oak pillars. Picture your mother in such a room, seventeen years ago, an unfamiliar man beside her, rain falling outside, drenching the wisteria leaves. Did it really happen, that curious little enterprise? It seems now both insignificant and far off, and flagrant as a just discovered crime. And yet it served its practical purpose, it’s true to say that without that bizarre excursion, mysteriously involving a trip to Paris at the same time, there might never have been you.
Your dad’s shown me the glossy brochure he was sent. I already knew: a Jacobean manor house, seat of the Akenhurst family, grandl
y added to in the nineteenth century by the Giffords, who made a fortune in rubber. Our room—then, I mean, Alan’s and mine—was in the Jacobean bit. There was a creaking, ancient staircase that made you feel, at once, that you were engaged in an act of stealth. Long-bearded, white-ruffed faces watched your every step. It’s inconceivable that something so old and worthy of preservation can have been transformed beyond all uncomfortable recognition in less than twenty years. I can only hope.
Outside, there was, and must still be, a lovely garden: lawns, yew walks, fountains and some sets of just slightly vulgar statuary, a foible of the Giffords, depicting classical scenes. Diana and Actaeon inevitably, Narcissus bending over a pool. We’d done a tour of their half-clad forms before dinner. I thought of them out there in the rain, like creatures in some petrified zoo, the drops forming on the stone nipples and chins. The Giffords, with their rubbery new money, had gone for ancestry and myth.
His skin had its strange but distinct, personal-sweat smell: mine must have had, to him, its own smell too. An individual, yet generic scent. At thirty-two, I could just about remember it from earlier days: the animal tang of someone you’ve never been naked with before.
Or ever again, in this case. We didn’t waste too much time over our departure the following morning. It was clear, bright weather again. Sunlight gleamed in the puddles on the terrace. The curves of the Downs were like a sure draughts-man’s line. I’d slept eventually, and perfectly soundly. And my mind was crystal-sharp and made up. I knew it was all right now, I knew it was perfectly fine.
I asked Alan to drop me at East Croydon, so I could take the train from there. So I could muster again some token illusion that I’d returned from Paris, by a Gatwick flight which would have departed, allowing for the time difference, at around ten o’clock. Another train from Victoria to Herne Hill. I had only a light, one-night case. The rather slinky small black dress inside it would have been explained by the cocktail party I’d been required to attend.
I was ready to abide, scrupulously, by another pretence that in seventeen years your father has never even suspected, let alone uncovered. But he scarcely asked about my time in Paris, because very soon after I got back I changed the topic quickly and emphatically. Perhaps I’d overwhelmed him, anyway, in that still grief-shadowed spring, with the happy, glad-to-be-home light in my face, with the hug I gave him, pressing myself against him hard. It was a fine Saturday in May, not quite lunchtime. I said, “Let’s go for a walk in Dulwich Park, Mikey. Let’s have a look at the ducks. Let’s have a drink in the Greyhound. I did some thinking while I was in Paris, and on the plane just now. A.I.D.: I’m absolutely sure. No problem, I want to go ahead.”
24
LET ME MAKE ONE thing absolutely clear, in case any doubt has entered your minds: Alan Fraser (MRCVS) is not your father. Neither of you has grey-blue eyes. We—that is, he—took all due precautions, in a hotel once owned by rubber barons. I’d rather lost touch, you could say, with such things.
In any case, that wasn’t the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise was—hypothetical. Alan Fraser isn’t your father, any more than Otis was. It’s just that without either of them, you might not be there at all.
But, of course, there must have been a practical exercise. It may not be wise to enquire too deeply into how we were brought about, but since the whole thing will be so calculatedly sprung on you tomorrow, since you’re about to discover that you yourselves were the work of painstaking calculation, you’ll at least want to know how the actual thing was done. Even if you don’t ask, you’re bound to wonder: you won’t be able to avoid a certain—image of your mother.
But, for all I know, perhaps you will ask. Perhaps you’ll both be uninhibitedly hungry for every graphic technical detail. Kids these days, they certainly don’t hold back. I’ve tried so hard to anticipate every possible form your reaction might take, from outrage to laughter, that perhaps nothing will surprise me. Perhaps you’ll even be thrilled to know that you were concocted in such a special way. You’ll want a badge for it (I hope not: what would go on it?). And you won’t feel at all like treading carefully. So, come on, Mum, spill it. We came out of a test tube?
No, not exactly. You came out of me—as I once explained, remember? When all’s said, there’s that wonderful fact and joy of my life, you came out of me. Have I ever told you how much I love you? Has your father?
It’s hardly a secret, anyway, how it was done, how it has to be done. A little mechanical thinking will get you there. It’s no more secret, mysterious or romantic, I’m afraid to say, than a visit to the dentist. To begin with, there was even a certain amount of dull bureaucracy, of form-filling and question-and-answer. First of all, we went along, the two of us, like responsible parents-to-be, to a place that dealt in such things and talked it over, in the strictest confidence of course.
We learnt the fundamental rule, which was the rule of anonymity. It’s the same rule for you, my darlings, as for us, we’ll need to make that clear tomorrow. There’s no way of knowing, even for you. You were conceived anonymously—or semi-anonymously, let’s more accurately say. Though, within the bounds of anonymity, it was possible to be selective, if not exactly fussy: skin, eye colour, hair colour. It was possible to attempt a kind of sketchy match. It was possible, I don’t mean to be flippant, to place an order.
This was when your dad, with all his resolve and resignation, got a little uncomfortable. This was when “He” began to loom, to seem suddenly close and actual, like someone who might already have been told about us and put on standby.
But my own nerves were steady. I’d been to the Gifford Park with our vet.
Then we signed the forms. Then I had some standard tests and was given an appointment, relative to my menstrual cycle. A little while before it, when it happened to be our anniversary, we went to Venice. Then one fine and sunny morning at the very end of June, I went back to the clinic and to a special room. Your father came with me. He didn’t have to—and I don’t mean that he came as well into that special room—but he drove me to the clinic, as if I were some fragile out-patient about to undergo something potentially upsetting. We both joked about this misplaced analogy, but somehow couldn’t shake it off.
I don’t know what Mike did, while I was—busy. He read the paper? He drank coffee in a Styrofoam cup from a vending machine? He walked round the block? Or he just waited, not in the building, but in the car park, in the car. That’s what he said: he’d be in the car, not in the building, where there were seats for waiting and magazines. Fair enough. When I came out through the glass doors he stepped from the car and walked towards me as if I might have needed help. Poor Mikey, what could he say: how did it go?
It doesn’t take very long. The real thing, after all, needn’t take very long. It all comes back to me now on this night: the ridiculous, bright-lit matter-of-factness. Like having an injection, a jab before you go on holiday. It had none of the momentousness of—tomorrow. I knew it might not even work. I didn’t even know whether to treat it, in my mind, as special or as merely functional. Both options seemed somehow treacherous. I tried, in fact, not to think at all. That’s the normal state of affairs, after all, with the real thing. It’s called conception, but who’s actually being conceptual?
It’s like a simple vaginal examination. So far as I know, Kate, you’ve not had one of those: a treat in store. A sort of speculum. Except something else, of course, is introduced. A nurse did the honours, a straw-blonde nurse of roughly my age (that pleased me) who introduced herself as Becky. I still, strangely, see her face, in close, physiognomic detail: a slightly too sharp nose, a slightly too thin mouth. Was she a mother herself or single? And how exactly was I to think of her? A nurse? A midwife? Hardly. A mid-husband, perhaps, a helping hand…And should you joke or be serious? It seemed somehow understood that too much humour would be inappropriate. Smiles and friendly efficiency, yes, but this was not quite a laughing matter. If the real thing sometimes can be.
C
linical neutrality—definitely no sexy dim lighting or soft music in the background. And, beneath it all, banishing the jokes anyway, the vague feeling that you’re doing something wrong, illicit or even, perhaps, harmful: you’re really having an abortion. I’m sorry, I’m only being honest.
Afterwards they ask you just to lie down and “rest” for a bit. I don’t know if it’s to encourage the natural processes or because they actually think you might be tired. No cup of tea and a biscuit—though I didn’t ask—and, of course, no post-coital cigarette. I did smoke a bit then too, as a matter of fact. I stopped, you’ll be glad to know, when I became pregnant. I might have stirred my tea, taken a drag and made small talk with Becky. “I’m here because of a cat, you know. Called Otis.”
So, not exactly a test tube. Though there would have been, I suppose, at some stage, a sort of test tube and someone, so to speak, would have been in it. A stranger slipped that day into our lives—an unfortunate phrase, since that’s just what he didn’t do, or not exactly, yes and no. When your dad saw me walk off to that special room I wasn’t in anyone else’s company, but when I walked out again through those glass doors you could say, in a manner of speaking, I was.
A stranger entered our lives—that’s not quite a happy phrase either. And not a complete and absolute stranger anyway, because of that preliminary vetting. I don’t seem to be able to get away from awkward puns.
In the “debating” stage, during those days and weeks after Otis’s return, and again when we’d made up our minds and contacted the clinic, I used to ride the train up to work, the Tube from Victoria to Green Park, and look constantly, furtively, at men around me. Perhaps not as furtively as I thought, and perhaps if they caught my eye they might have got the wrong idea. This sort of thing, after all, goes on all the time. But they could hardly have guessed the nature of my interest. They could hardly have guessed that I wasn’t just looking, but searching.