The Longing

by Jane Asher

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ muttered Michael, not sure whether to be proud or ashamed in front of this jolly young medic. How fresh and uncrushed he looks, he thought, how unworried and simple and clean. I bet he doesn’t jerk off in quirky side rooms, all on his own. He’ll make his baby by the direct route, no worries, bang bang, a few quick thrusts and sperm’ll be swimming, eggs’ll be cracking, breasts swelling and a firm young belly filling with his easy, boisterous, natural child.

  Michael was to look back on this first meeting with Anthony Northfield with something akin to fascination. From the new perspective given him by those few short horrifying months that followed, he would find it hard to believe that he hadn’t sensed anything. An instinct should have warned him, some male antenna should have picked up impending danger. But it didn’t.

  He handed over the phial and stood up, aware of his own creased trousers and unkempt hair. Funny, he thought, how uncombed hair is attractively tousled when you are twenty-five but depressingly messy when there’s less of it and you’re over forty.

  Juliet could see her Wellington boots were not going to fit any more. Her feet had grown so quickly over the last few minutes that there was no longer any hope of being able to pull them on and she picked one up and threw it at Michael. ‘Come on,’ she heard him say firmly in her ear, ‘all over now.’

  When she opened her eyes, muttering and squirming as her conscious mind dragged itself unwillingly back to the reality of leather couch and bright lights from the strange, time-altered dream, she realised it wasn’t Michael but the anaesthetist who was speaking, and she sat up suddenly in embarrassment.

  ‘Careful now,’ the wildly grey-haired head bent towards her and a scrubbed pink hairy hand was placed over her forearm, ‘take it easy. You are a jumpy one, aren’t you?’

  Anthony’s young, keen face appeared round the door. ‘Five!’ he announced triumphantly. ‘Five! And three of them excellent. I’m really pleased – that’s more than I expected.’

  ‘Oh that’s wonderful!’ Juliet felt enormously proud and relieved. She was wide awake now, and could hardly keep from leaping up in her excitement, but paused for a second as she pushed herself up on one hand to close her eyes and examine the line of little Mabel Lucie Attwell babies that had assembled in an instant in her mind’s eye; three of them plump, bonny and smiling, the other two more thin and serious.

  The nurse, who had been hovering next to her elbow, took her arm and gently helped to ease her off the couch. ‘Come and sit down in the recovery room and I’ll fetch you that cup of tea,’ she said, and guided Juliet out of the brightly lit room and back through the small corridor into the comfort of a small side room furnished with a couple of armchairs and a table piled with magazines. She settled her patient into one of the chairs, covered her with a rather old-looking blue blanket, and gave an encouraging smile before bustling out of the room.

  Juliet wished she’d asked for coffee instead of tea, but didn’t have the energy to call after the nurse. In any case, she was enjoying this moment far too much to spoil it by speaking. She wanted to examine the feeling of joy and elation inside her before the spell was broken. Stage one was achieved – she had made it! She dared now to unpack and look at the irrational thoughts that had been buried inside her beneath the recent layers of optimism – supposing there hadn’t been any eggs there, after all? Supposing they had been bad, or broken, or addled or whatever happens to human eggs when they’ve gone wrong? ‘Excellent,’ he had said, ‘excellent.’ She saw the magnificent word rolling around her head like a ball of wire wool inside a kettle, cleaning out the furry bits of fear and uncertainty and leaving a shiny, refreshed brain, ready for the wonderful new thoughts that she would let creep into it when she was ready.

  ‘Five,’ she whispered out loud, ‘and three of them excellent. Yes!’ She wiggled her legs, this time in glee and impatience, and laughed to herself at the very thought of it all. She could sense the image of five cherubic little babies hovering again on the edge of her mind’s eye, just waiting to be let in, but she resisted the temptation to look at it, and instead tried to picture the small glass dish containing the eggs that she supposed at this very moment was making its way down to the laboratory.

  She was quite surprised to see Michael when he came into the recovery room, and realised she hadn’t given him a moment’s thought since she had come round from the anaesthetic.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ he said as he bent to kiss her. ‘How are you feeling? You look fine.’

  ‘Yes, I am fine.’ Why didn’t she tell him? What was stopping her shouting out the glorious news?

  ‘Julie – they found five, darling, did you know? Isn’t that wonderful?’

  She felt cheated that Michael already knew. Not because she wanted the pleasure of telling him herself, but because she counted it as a personal triumph, a special secret between her and those hovering babies that she hadn’t been quite ready to share, and she resented his hijacking the moment for himself.

  ‘Of course I know. I was there, remember?’

  ‘I didn’t know how long you’d been awake. Anyway, it’s great news.’ Michael had grown so accustomed to Juliet’s irritability over the last few weeks that he deflected it automatically, almost without being aware of it. ‘Oh, here comes our tea.’

  The nurse pushed aside some of the magazines on the low table between the two chairs and put the tray of tea and biscuits down on it. ‘As soon as you feel up to it, you can get dressed, Mrs Evans, and go home. But take as long as you like, there’s no hurry.’

  ‘Thank you so much, nurse,’ Michael called after her as she left the room. He stirred a large spoonful of sugar into one of the cups and then passed it to Juliet, miming a silent kiss at her as he leant across the table. She smiled back at him.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m so ratty, darling. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.’

  ‘I do. I feel a bit the same. You should have seen me up in that ghastly room – I was ready to bite anyone’s head off half an hour ago.’

  ‘Was it OK?’

  ‘Yes. Eventually. In terms of head count a few hundred thousand or so, they tell me. Pretty good going compared to your five.’

  ‘Yes, but three of mine were excellent, you know. I bet no one said any of yours were excellent.’ She giggled as she sipped her tea, then put her cup down and reached out to stroke the side of his cheek. ‘Thanks, darling.’

  ‘What on earth for? For my magnificent sperm?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Just thanks for being so good to me. I’m so bloody impossible at the moment.’

  ‘I love you. You know that. You don’t have to thank me. Just make sure it’s a boy, that’s all.’

  Down in the lab Juliet’s eggs were being cleaned of stray cells until the five little potential beings were ready to meet their future partners. An embryologist in a white coat used a large pipette to suck them up out of their dish and expel them one by one into tiny semispheres in yet another dish, then brought over the jar of Michael’s washed and prepared sperm. As he added a drop carefully to each little indented container, hundreds of thousands of wriggling sperm were let loose to begin the frantic, mindless, instinctive race to be the one to reach the egg, penetrate it and begin the series of events which would fulfil its ultimate purpose of reproducing its genetic information.

  ‘Now, Mrs Evans,’ the nurse had re-entered the room and was lifting the blue blanket off Juliet’s knees, ‘do you feel like getting dressed now?’

  ‘Yes, certainly. And what do we—’

  ‘Yes, I’m just going to explain that. Give us a ring in the morning, about ten-ish. We’ll know by then how many of the eggs have been fertilised, and be able to give you an idea of when we’ll need you in for implantation.’

  ‘I see. Thank you. Do you think they’ll be all right?’

  The nurse was used to the eternal need for reassurance that the women in her care always demanded. ‘You can never be sure, of course. Let’s just wait and see, shal
l we. They did well to find five, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Juliet said, irresistibly picturing a cardboard egg carton with one missing. ‘Thank you. And thank you for the tea – it was lovely. Thank you so much.’

  She knew she was being over-effusive, but couldn’t help herself. She felt so grateful to everyone around her for their kindness, their compassion and their understanding, and she was loth to leave, wanting this moment of happiness and comforting hope to last, frightened that it would all seem so different once she walked out of the clinic.

  ‘What makes you think it was my wife?’

  Michael could hardly bear the terrible news that he had just heard. He thought the last few months had thrown everything possible at him, but this latest blow had come so unexpectedly that it hurt him more than anything that had gone before. The part of him that was at first relieved to hear news of Juliet became submerged in the horror of learning what she had done. He had known it was she who had taken the baby as soon as the policeman had begun describing the reason for his visit, but prayed that his instinct was wrong, that there had been a mistake, that Juliet had, after all, had nothing to do with this terrible crime.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The young mother was able to give us quite an accurate description, sir, of a woman she saw near the pram just before the incident. We matched it with our missing persons file on the computer and the similarities between the person she described and the photographs we have of your wife, together with the clothes we know she was wearing, were too strong to be ignored. Of course it’s perfectly possible that it wasn’t her at all, but given the problems that your wife has been—’

  ‘Yes, it’s all right, you don’t have to explain.’

  Michael could suddenly see Juliet leaning over a pram, lifting a tiny bundle up and out of it, and cradling it on to her chest. He closed his eyes for a moment and turned his head away from the policeman as he spoke.

  ‘It was her. I know it. You’re right.’

  ‘No, sir – I didn’t say that, I only said—’

  ‘Please let me meet her.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The woman – girl. Please let me meet her.’

  All the misery and disappointments Michael had survived up till now were thrown up again and relived as he thought of the wretched mother of this stolen child. He felt his own losses echoed through hers, and an instinctive reaction to reach out and comfort her was what prompted his impulsive plea to the officer sitting in front of him.

  ‘I’m not sure if that’s really such a good idea, sir. She’s very distressed, and—’

  ‘Well, of course she is,’ interrupted Michael bitterly. ‘Don’t you see how I understand that? She and I have a lot in common, you know. I just think I might be able to help. Please let me see her.’

  The detective almost smiled at the idea of Michael and Anna having a lot in common. It was hard to imagine two more disparate types than the well-educated, quietly charming Michael Evans and the roughened young girl that was Anna Watkins.

  ‘Please!’

  Something in the way Michael looked at him was so honest, and so blatantly pleading that the detective hesitated. He could see no possible good in bringing these two sad people together and yet, somehow, he felt ashamed to come between them.

  ‘I’ll have a chat to the young lady,’ he said at last. ‘But I’m sure you’ll understand, sir, if she doesn’t want to see you.’

  ‘Yes, I will. Just ask her though, please.’

  Late at night, in a lab next to the one where Juliet’s eggs and Michael’s sperm were lying together in a dish considering their future, Dr Timothy Stark idly wondered, not for the first time, if he was God. It was not long since the thirty-year-old clinician had learnt the technique of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (or ICSI to its friends) and he still marvelled at his power to be not only a witness at the moment of conception, but also its initiator. His musings on his possible status as the Deity provided excellent material for conversations at his wife’s dinner parties, where he would casually bring up the subject of what one meant by God, and gently steer it towards the definition ‘creation of life’. At this point he would sit up in his chair, raise a hand in the air and with a triumphant cry make claim to his position as the Lord. This caused much amusement, and on a good evening perhaps a little shock among the more religious guests at the table.

  As he bent forward to peer into the eyepiece of his microscope the shadow of his white-coated figure was thrown on to the cream walls of the lab by the light from an Anglepoise lamp on the table beside him. The only other illumination in the room came from the escaping reflections of the bright light under the microscope and the bluish glow from the monitor next to it. His one open eye focused on the magnified mass of squiggling sperm before him. Without raising his head, he reached for the handle that manipulated the tiny, sucking needle that he would use to pick up one of the sperm and inject it directly into a waiting egg. When he moved his hand a system of gears transferred his large, clumsy movements into microscopic adjustments and he watched closely as what appeared to be a large pointed stick entered his field of vision from the right. The stick quivered slightly as Dr Stark shifted his bottom on the stool and took a deep breath in preparation for the chase, aware as he did so in the silence of the room of the small rustling of the material of his coat and the remnants of a slight wheeze in his chest from a recent cold. He spotted a likely-looking sperm in the circle of light in front of him and sucked it up without difficulty, wriggling and tadpole-like, into the end of the needle. Gently he expelled it again and, before it could make a break for freedom, tapped it firmly on what he couldn’t help thinking of as its head, until it was stunned, still and dormant. He always felt uncomfortable at this moment of sperm bashing, aware that too violent a tap could harm it, and too little leave it springy and keen enough to turn round and escape from the egg the moment he released it. But how simple it really was, he thought, this business of creation. That had been Frankenstein’s mistake, of course, in combining ready grown and mature human body parts and attempting to invest them with life; how he would have admired the simplicity and intelligence of this method of the nineties. All one had to do was to choose and join up the components in a glorious pick’n’mix and then stand back and watch the miracle of creation take place. And the miracle would ensure that they grew into creatures every bit as fascinating and complex as the clinician who had given them life.

  Whether his part in this extraordinary process added in any way to the sum total of human happiness, or brought any nearer the possibility of enhanced wellbeing in the world was not something Dr Stark felt necessary to consider. He was indeed not even particularly aware of the small surges of individual happiness that were caused by the fertilised eggs that left his laboratory going on to grow into healthy babies, or of the depths of despair that were caused by those that didn’t. His world existed within the walls of his laboratory, and his successes and failures all took place in the small glass dishes in front of him and in the microscopic events that took place there.

  Next door in one of the small indentations in the numbered plastic tray that lay in a glass-fronted cupboard, Michael’s microscopic, wriggling sperm were approaching Juliet’s eggs.

  Dr Stark gathered up another of Mr Jephcote’s inert sperm in the end of the needle and moved it across the micro-distance that separated the pool of sperm from Mrs Jephcote’s cleansed and waiting egg. The fat, magnified needle hovered for a few seconds outside the wall of the zona pellucida, then moved suddenly towards it. The sharp stab forward merely made it bend inwards like resistant rubber. A second attempt broke through, and Dr Stark watched the immensely enlarged but in reality unimaginably microscopic drama as he expelled the still unmoving sperm into the very heart of the egg. He imagined his whispered comment to his wife later in the night when he would creep quietly into bed next to her drowsy body: ‘Well, a few more miracles tonight.’

  One of
Michael’s sperm, too, broke through the token resistance of the shell of one of Juliet’s eggs and settled in to make its mark.

  Chapter Seven

  An old lady was very slowly manoeuvring two large bundles of what looked like pieces of rag into the only lift that appeared to be working in the block of council flats, so after a vain attempt to help her, which was met by an astonishingly vigorous burst of abuse, Michael and the policeman made their way up the stone steps to the fifth floor. At the end of a narrow balcony which looked down on to a concrete playground and rows of dustbin sheds was the door to Anna’s flat.

  Michael heard footsteps running to open it at the sound of the bell, and a young woman flung it wide with a half-suppressed look of hope on a puffy, white little face. Before she had time to speak the policeman forestalled her.

  ‘I’ve brought Mr Evans, Anna, as we discussed. We won’t keep you long.’

  The look of crushing disappointment was there so briefly it was almost imperceptible. As quickly as Michael saw it, it was replaced by a clenching around the mouth and a look of what might almost be taken for hatred in her black eyes. She moved back to let them past her into the dark, narrow hallway.

  ‘Go in,’ she said quietly, and pointed to a door on the right which led into a small sitting room. The two men went ahead of her into the room, and stood awkwardly looking around, waiting for her. Red nylon curtains were half drawn across a small single window, and the sun shining through the narrow strip of uncovered glass revealed a thousand grey dots where the morning’s rain had dried to leave the tell-tale residue of London dirt. The room was immaculately tidy, almost bare, and was furnished only with a small sofa upholstered in red Dralon, a worn yellow armchair, two wooden upright chairs with plastic seats and a low coffee table covered with a white lace cloth, on which stood two half-empty cups of coffee and a plate of biscuits. A television in the corner was showing an old black-and-white film with the sound turned down.