After the Peace

by Fay Weldon

  Gwinny told them keeping Rozzie in ignorance was unwise, but they took no notice. Why would Rozzie ever need to know? The law changed in 2005 so donation ceased to be anonymous and a donor child had the legal right to know who had fathered it, but the law, thank God, was too late for Rozzie. The law was an ass anyway. Just as they referred to the police as ‘the pigs’ (a leftover from their hippie days), they treated all institutions with blanket derision, from the State, the Police, to the Law, and peppered their conversations with the occasional ‘bloody’ and ‘fucking’ when searching for an elusive adjective. Gwinny would ask them not to. When she was eighteen months old Rozzie startled the crèche nurse by asking her for the ‘fucking dummy’. Quite an incident, at the time, as ‘uses foul language’ nearly went on little Rozzie’s school record.

  A terrible thought for Gwinny: suppose it was Clive who managed to impregnate Xandra the same month as she was turkey basted; supposing he still had a few slow-swimming sperm left in his balls when it happened? Supposing Rozzie was Clive’s child, after all, not Sebastian, Lord Dilberne’s? Perhaps the out-of-date, half price, frozen sperm had failed after all, and one of Clive’s rare laggards had finally speeded up and just got where it was meant to go, even after thirteen years of Clive trying and failing. Just one was all it took. Perhaps Rozzie was just a cooler, brighter, better version of Clive?

  Perhaps Flora had responded okay to Gwinny’s imprecations but got the timing wrong? Perhaps there had been a power cut during the twenty years in the freezer, so the sperm didn’t ‘take’. The Gods were a tricky bunch. Then the beautiful Rozzie would not have Dilberne genes at all.

  What, and all this fuss for nothing? Never! She wiped the very possibility from her mind.

  So it was resolved, almost by default, that Rozzie could be kept in ignorance of her true parentage.

  ‘Yet ah! why should they know their fate? Since sorrow never comes too late, And happiness too swiftly flies. Thought would destroy their paradise. No more; where ignorance is bliss, ’Tis folly to be wise,’ quoted Clive once again from Thomas Gray’s Ode.

  ‘Silence can be ominous when delivered as a mortal blow to the psyche, heart or the soul,’ quoted Gwinny in defiance, but for once they took no notice of her Gibran.

  ‘So long as Rozzie’s happy,’ was Xandra’s attitude, when her primary school entered her for a Camden Junior Chess Championship.

  ‘Who needs her to be clever?’ said Clive.

  The Wrong Time

  The Smithsons’ ‘your-father-is-a-turkey-baster’ conversation happened on New Year’s Eve, Thursday December 31st 2015. It was the day before Rozzie’s sixteenth birthday. We were having her party a day early, because on New Year’s Day Xandra had a triple-pay shift up at the hospital which she could not afford to lose, Clive claimed he had an audition and I had a sitting with a client from the old days.

  Rozzie was due home from the All London Champion Chess Club in Hendon at around five. She loved chess, and why would she not? She was better than most at it, barring a few grandmasters. A child chess prodigy. The Ham & High filmed her as she played – the pretty little blonde head bowed in concentration over the board. At primary school she played against a visiting grandmaster, and the game ended as a stalemate. And it wasn’t only chess. She had an eidetic memory, was as good at the sciences as the humanities – and as for Maths! – well, she took her GCSE three years earlier than was normal even at St Katherine’s Anglican School for Gifted Girls.

  When she was small all went well. Rozzie was obedient, sweet and kind. And she could sing. She was quiet, tidy, and seemed possessed of sufficient empathy not to be fully on the autistic spectrum. She could not only out-quote Clive from the age of six, looking up everything he quoted on Google and coming back at him going one better, but doing so tactfully. Xandra and Clive could see she was bright, but resolutely denied that she was anything special. Why would Clive want to admit that this brilliant paragon of sweetness and light derived from loins other than his own? Why would Xandra want to risk any further disturbance to domestic harmony than she absolutely had to? They loved her; that was surely enough.

  It was 5.30 on New Year’s Eve, 2015. Rozzie was due home from the chess club around now. At fifteen a girl is old enough to get home safely from Hendon, though perhaps too many will already be rolling around drunk. It’s only five stops on the Underground – Hendon to Chalk Farm on the Northern Line. She was an independent girl and already a karate junior black belt.

  A Dreadful Row

  Xandra herself was just back from a long shift on the Intensive Care ward up at Hampstead, where she was now a Band 7 practice instructor. The secret of managing both home and family, achieving a successful work/life balance, Xandra knew, lay in organisation and she was a great organiser. But sometimes you would just like to kick your shoes off your swollen feet and sit down. She did love Rozzie, even though she was sometimes if not exactly frightened but a little awed by her, and it was nearly her birthday, and like any other mother she too wanted to celebrate. So within five minutes Xandra had washed her hands and changed out of her uniform (in the last sixteen years she’d speeded up) and was already preparing the white bread (a special treat) Marmite sandwiches for Rozzie’s birthday party, with insufficiently softened butter. Clive had forgotten to take it from the fridge early as she’d reminded him to do.

  Clive had his feet up on the sofa. He was back home from a matinée performance of Phantom of the Opera, which had run for two hours and forty-five minutes instead of the usual two hours thirty. Nobody takes matinées seriously and Clive was understudying the understudy who that afternoon was taking Hugh Panchetti’s place as the lead, and though Clive was for once earning he felt generally bored and humiliated. Not surprising; when Clive played Joseph, Panchetti had been the one to understudy him. That had been thirty-eight years ago.

  Well, that’s life; some rise, some fall; in showbiz sometimes meteorically. But resentment and fury can make a man really tired.

  ‘Good day?’ Xandra asked Clive, as she trimmed the bread for the sandwiches. It was a half-way house between tea and supper to suit Rozzie’s convenience. Hard-boiled eggs with tuna dip to follow, and a spectacular iced birthday cake from Waitrose Xandra had picked up on the way home.

  ‘Idiotic question,’ growled Clive from the sofa. Few men look good when they lounge on a sofa drinking beer in front of the TV. But Clive managed, even at fifty-two, albeit by now a little grey jowled. He had kept his excellent matinée-idol looks – the narrow face, straight nose, firm chin, the bright blue piercing eyes, the lean, graceful body of the man Xandra had married twenty-nine years ago.

  Xandra, now fifty-five, seemed both shorter and wider than the slim, dancing creature she had been at the wedding. Employment and motherhood had aged her. Now she carefully softened the butter with the same methodical efficiency with which she administered life-critical injections. Two seconds in the microwave and you had spreadable butter. Three, and you were left with a yellow pool of grease.

  ‘Boring as hell if you want to know. The Phantom was even flatter than usual in Music of the Night. Giggling in the front rows didn’t help. Calls himself a tenor and can’t even hit an A flat. Sleazy little worm. Okay? What other details do you require?’

  Xandra said that was more than enough and cut the crusts off the sandwiches, filled half of them with Marmite, and half with a soft crab pâté, then arranged them on paper doilies. She laid the table as prettily as possible and put the cake in pride of place, while Clive went on contemplating in graphic detail with whom the Phantom’s understudy could have slept on his race to the bottom of the singing world.

  At 6.50 Clive had exhausted his daily wrath, pulled himself together and by seven was washed, shaved and smartened up to be the usual charming self he liked to be in front of Rozzie, though with a bit of tissue sticking to the shaving cut on his chin.

  All he wanted to do was relax and watch the thriller on BBC and wait for Rozzie to turn up at the door. He wa
s watching a group of male detectives and one female – Gillian Anderson of the X files, now in The Fall – huddling over the broken body of a young, naked girl. She lay on a slab in the corner of the Smithsons’ living room, limp hand dripping blood from her fingertips, neck slit. But forget the dead girl. A truly charming and good-looking serial killer was at work, and the lady senior detective seemed to have a yen for rough trade. Clive was smoking weed, and didn’t want to miss a frame. And Xandra, who annoyingly never smoked, was prattling on.

  ‘Sometime, Clive, we do have to tell her. Perhaps today would be a good time? She’s on the brink of womanhood, all that.’

  ‘Tell her what?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘No I don’t know. What are you talking about?’

  ‘The sperm bank. All that.’

  ‘There’s no reason whatsoever to tell her “all that”. She’s doing very nicely as she is. Why do you want to upset her? Children belong to those who look after them, not those who donored them. Ha-ha. Joke. We have it on Brecht’s authority. Anyway it was an anonymous donor. There’s no point in her knowing. She looks like me, she thinks like me, leave it at that.’

  ‘But supposing she ever finds out? You’re meant to tell them.’

  ‘Meant, by whom? Why? Not like today when you can check medical records. Rozzie can’t. What good would it be for Rozzie to find out her dad’s a paranoid schizophrenic? And for all we know that’s what he is, with any luck dead by now. Bless him.’

  By which he meant ‘curse him’. Clive was smoking, going into rant mode. He must have had a very bad afternoon at the theatre. Xandra’s hadn’t been too good, either. She was back on Intensive Care and had lost one newborn, and a twenty-year-old lad who’d been hovering for three weeks, and came out of a coma only to promptly die. She wanted to cry but had been trained not to, and Clive would just suggest she changed her job to something better paid.

  ‘I only meant—’ she started, and then gave up. He was rolling another and Rozzie would be back soon. Clive believed he never smoked in front of Rozzie, but the sudden movements, the rapid stubbing out and the emptying of the ashtray, as he deleted the traces of illegality and dependence, were obvious to friends, family, and anyone with half a brain. And Rozzie noticed everything. But what could Xandra do? She too had smoked in her time. She understood Clive’s necessity. He had smoked so much and so long.

  ‘Meant, meant!’ he scorned. ‘Just because some stupid corrupt politicians in hock to the NHS fiddle with the law, doesn’t mean we have to take any fucking notice. Just another way of making our children miserable. Satanic. The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But what do they care? So let’s just forget, shall we?’

  Xandra sighed. It was time for a diversion. She could open the window and put on the fan as soon as he left the room. He needed protection from himself.

  In the meantime she was worried. New Year’s Eve and already pictures on the telly of drunken crowds rollicking round.

  Xandra moved the hands of the clock on twenty minutes so Clive would think it was later than it really was. Clive stared at the next naked girl choking and dying nastily.

  ‘I’m worried. Where has Rozzie got to?’ said Xandra.

  ‘The child doesn’t need mollycoddling,’ said Clive. ‘She’ll be perfectly fine. It was her choice to go. She needs to learn to hurry home. You’re not nearly strict enough. He that spareth the rod hateth the child: but he that loveth her chasteneth her betimes. Proverbs 13:24,’ he misquoted.

  ‘Do just take the car and go and find her, Clive,’ she begged. ‘It’s New Year’s Eve. Everyone will be drunk.’

  ‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘You’re being menopausal. The streets are safe enough. One CCTV camera for every eleven citizens in London. The Daily Mail says so. If you’re really worried you can always go and fetch her from the chess club.’

  ‘You just don’t want to get off the sofa. I know you’ve had a hard day’s work and you’re tired,’ said Xandra. ‘Well, actually, so am I.’ Which was true enough.

  ‘I wish you had a normal job,’ said Clive. ‘Do something different. I daresay Rozzie would like a bit of attention from her mother for once.’ The Fall had come to an end; there was lots more to come but you had to wait a week for the next episode. He switched off iPlayer, and rolled another cigarette, signalling how hard done by he was. ‘Toothache has started up again. I need to stay as still as I can. I don’t dare set it off again. That shit of a dentist, curse him. I hope he dies in front of his children, in great pain. Don’t look so shocked. It’s the same shit he inflicts on me. Am I what you call ranting again?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Xandra. She was crying.

  ‘And you’ll blame it on the weed, I suppose. Which it is not. I will not be censored in my own home. Go on making your dainty little sandwiches; Rozzie still won’t love you. You’re never here to love. Why would she? And I’m sure you’re tired. You’re always tired. Watching people die is a tiring business. No wonder you’re crying at me. If you’re really worried about your poor neglected child and too tired to get her, try Gwinny next door.’

  So Xandra did, though rather red eyed, and Gwinny went in search of Rozzie straight away. And that was the end of the attempt at the important conversation.

  Clive was very sensitive on the subject, and it had been foolish of Xandra to raise it. Few of their rows were quite as awful as this one.

  Chess Foster Mother

  So it was Gwinny who’d had to act as chess mother and fetch Rozzie. She’d done so from the beginning, borrowing Xandra’s little yellow 2CV, ferrying the child here and there, getting her from this tournament to that, soothing the anxious brow (though Rozzie scarcely ever scowled. She did not intend to develop frown lines in later life). Not that Gwinny resented it – someone had to do it – but the Smithsons did sometimes seem to take advantage.

  It wasn’t that they were stupid – or only when compared to their daughter – they just had a tendency to believe what it was convenient to believe, to blind themselves to what was obvious to others.

  Gwinny found Rozzie walking up the Chalk Farm Road. CCTV cameras followed her all the way so she had adjusted her behaviour accordingly, striding gracefully, not slouching; smiling for the omnipresent lens. She got into the car in a not very good mood. Gwinny could tell from the way the girl tapped her deft little fingers, half adult, and half child, on the dashboard of the little yellow deux-chevaux. Others were picked up from the club, or indeed from St Katherine’s Anglican School for Gifted Girls, in Rolls-Royces, at the very least Mercedes. Standard Road was still a somewhat down-market area but other grander, richer streets were all around. Rozzie was in danger of turning into a little snob, Gwinny feared.

  It seemed Rozzie had been in the running for the FIDE English Youth Grand Prix, but today, she complained: she had actually been beaten by a twenty-five-year-old Russian by the name of Igor, who had not had the courtesy of letting a schoolgirl win, not even one as prettily seductive as this one, and one who was surely deserving of some respect, having taken her Maths GCSE three years earlier than normal and had, she reminded me, rubbished a grandmaster while still at primary school.

  ‘You must learn to take defeat gracefully.’

  ‘I don’t see why. It doesn’t happen all that often.’

  Gwinny could see that a likeness to Clive, if not nature, was certainly nurture.

  They drove in silence a little. Gwinny tried to make the silence seem disapproving but it didn’t work, for the next thing Rozzie did was to ask how much her house was worth.

  ‘Your parents bought it for a song in 1986. Now it’s worth £600,000 and rising fast.’

  ‘I suppose it’s some kind of security.’

  ‘I would have thought so. Mine is worth more because of my studio.’

  ‘Peanuts,’ she said. I was really glad to get her home. Fortunately she beamed suc
h a charming smile at me, and thanked me for picking her up and apologised for being grumpy but she had a few things to work out in her head, that I forgave her at once. She had a kind of Aphrodite smile she could switch on or off at will. She had learned it at nursery, given it up in primary school, rediscovered it at St Katherine’s, where the girls were both posh and clever. I had seen her use it once on one of the fathers, a Minister of State, no less. She only went for the top. I don’t know what happened and I don’t suppose much, but the daughter no longer spoke to her.

  ‘There, told you, Xandra,’ said Clive when we came in. ‘No need to worry about our Rozzie. But thank you, Gwinny.’ He was always on his best behaviour when Rozzie was around, but I felt she was not fooled. Xandra, though tear stained, was smiling bravely. High tea was served in the conservatory.

  The cake, the talking point, was iced in pink and decorated with especially crafted mini-make-up – miniature lipsticks, eyebrow brushes, mascara wands, discs of rouge, all blended tastefully into the icing – and in spun sugar the message ‘Welcoming our very special girl to the world of grown-ups’.

  ‘I wasn’t sure it was suitable,’ said Xandra, ‘but the girl in Waitrose said it was the season’s bestseller so I placed an order.’

  ‘Absolutely lovely, Mum,’ said Rozzie, ‘Waitrose always gets it right and so you do too. It’s high time I started to use make-up, isn’t it?’ She was using her dutiful daughter smile, demure and obedient. Rozzie had a range of very effective smiles for every occasion. Earnest scholar, good friend, responsible daughter, sleepy girl, hungry girl and dieting girl: I’d met them all: the full-blast Aphrodite one I’d had just now, only occasionally used – I think I only got it because she was preoccupied. I wasn’t particularly useful to her.

  ‘Shall we all just sit round the table and eat the cake,’ she suggested. Obediently, we all did. She had her patient girl smile, the one she used when talking to the particularly stupid. She waited until all our mouths were full of a quite dense Madeira cake.