by Fay Weldon
‘I want you all to listen very carefully. It’s obvious to me, Clive, that you’re not my real father. Somewhere, somehow, I have another one. Two brown-eyed parents, if both are heterozygous, can have a blue-eyed baby. Mine are hazel, which comes into the brown cluster. By these rules it would seem that two blue-eyed parents cannot have a hazel-eyed baby. However, eye colour is polygenic, and several other genes exert their effects as well. So yes, while it’s unusual, it is possible for blue-eyed parents to have a hazel-eyed child. But there is other evidence.’
Alerted by eye colour, she told us, she’d had a DNA test done – fifteen Y-chromosome samples in all – and it had come back to prove negative for Clive as father, positive for Xandra as mother. She’d used hair from both their combs. Rather disgusting. Clive should take care to clean the teeth of his from time to time, preferably in the dishwasher which sterilised things properly. She had concluded she must be a donor child. Clive was not her father.
‘I’ll have something to say about that,’ said Clive feebly, spluttering cake crumbs across the table, but was too shocked to say what it was. He turned to me and said, ‘And you stop laughing,’ which I suppose I was, but none of it seemed very funny. Cake was dripping out of Xandra’s open mouth.
‘Just as well for you, Mum,’ said Rozzie, ‘that I share many genes with you.’ Such a neat little mouth, such a sweet little face. ‘Otherwise I’d have thought you’d got out like Simkins Two one night and come back with kittens, and Pa wouldn’t have liked that one bit.’
She helped herself to a nibble of hard-boiled egg. The tuna dip she found too messy to undertake.
‘I told you so,’ said Xandra to Clive. ‘Now see what you’ve done.’
Clive turned to Rozzie. ‘After all I’ve done for you.’
‘You did a fucking good Modern Major General,’ she said generously. ‘I’ll say that for you. But that was about all. You were home all day and Mum was out all day.’
Clive wandered over to the TV and turned it on. He was unsteady and stumbling. He had drunk nothing, but had probably smoked quite a lot.
‘O monstrous beast, how like a swine she lies!’ he declaimed. ‘Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare. You’ll hear more of this, young lady,’ he muttered from back on the sofa. ‘How dare you speak to your mother like that!’
On the screen the New Year revelry in Trafalgar Square was beginning. Clive turned the volume up. Xandra had always thought perhaps he was a little deaf, but no. This is what he had spent decades training for; never to hear anything he didn’t want to.
Rozzie raised her clear bell-like voice just a little. She enunciated beautifully. St Katherine’s had trained her well.
‘Except there was always you, Grandma Gwinny. But you’re no relative at all. What goes on? I know what the neighbours say but I don’t think so.’
‘It is certainly not so.’
‘I don’t know what we would have done without you. However, here we are, me a sperm bank baby, fathered by a turkey baster. Bet you had to do it, Gwinny. He wouldn’t have had the nerve. But you should have told me early on, not left me to find out for myself.’
I realised she was not as friendly to me as I had hoped. Between us we, representatives of the pre-digital age, had created a monster Frankenstein would be proud of.
Xandra pulled herself together, crossed to the sofa, switched off the TV and even pulled the plugs out. Clive looked bewildered and rolled another joint. Xandra shared it with him. A gesture of solidarity, I thought.
I could not deny that Rozzie was very much my own creation. I was the one who selected her father, warmed his frozen sperm in the microwave – and Rozzie was right. Clive, suddenly squeamish, having bought the baster in the first place from Woolworth’s (remember Woolworth’s?), lost his nerve and left it to me. And me, I’d had to act before the stuff got cold. Xandra was fretting and Clive was quoting: ‘Let not lust’s winter come ere summer half be done: Shakespeare: Venus and Adonis’ – although doing what I did did seem at the time something of an unwarranted intimacy – impregnation was a man’s job, not a woman’s. But Clive was like that. As impetuous as Xandra was steady.
Little, villainous, child prodigy Rozzie, always with an eye for drama, was thus able to emerge triumphant, unscathed and perfect from her mother’s battered womb, like Aphrodite from the foam.
But she hadn’t finished with us yet. She named her father as Sebastian, Lord Dilberne. 6ft 1in, blue eyes, blond hair: BA (Oxon), action man, aristocrat. It was my turn to be shocked. The previous Lord Dilberne had been a friend of Lord Petrie; as his nurse I had manoeuvred the latter’s wheelchair up the broad steps of 3 Belgrave Square many a time; as his wife I had spent weekends at lovely Dilberne Court in Sussex. I knew the family – not well; I was not of their class – but enough. Nor did I suggest by as much as a blink of an eye that the name meant anything to me.
But how, how?
‘Easy enough,’ she said, ‘if you put your trust in lateral thinking. Millennial thinking, indeed.’
I Ching: Hexagram 61. ‘Inner Truth.’ Pigs And Fishes
She’d discovered the envelope in which the sperm, labelled no. 116349, had arrived hidden in Xandra’s knickers drawer – kept for sentimental reasons, Rozzie hoped. Perhaps her mother had some residual feelings for her, after all.
Xandra puffed away at another joint, snuggled up to Clive and tried not to hear. They would sit this outbreak of teenage hysteria out. She switched the TV on again. New Year fireworks filled the old 26-inch screen, popping and screeching and sending a range of coloured shadows racing through the conservatory. The North Wind got up. People on the screen screamed and ran for cover. The leak in the glass roof opened up. Plop, plop, plop.
Good old Boreas. I knew someone from Olympia would surface. But perhaps it was he who’d blown a chill through Rozzie’s heart? I shouldn’t have been mean. I should have got the roof mended. Should, should, should.
Rozzie had peeled off the Brilliant Baby Clinic sticker and found an older label for the Your Beautiful Baby Clinic underneath. Since the sperm was half price she had realised her parents had been offered old stock. Google told her where the Your Beautiful Baby archives were kept, in Hatfield, for some reason. She had gone there posing as a journalist (Young Reporter of the Year Prize, age group 16–17) and been welcomed by a bored archivist, had reckoned back to the date of her probable conception, and looked through the files to find one which tallied with the date that sample 116349 had left the refrigerated warehouse. She’d found 6ft 1in, blue eyes, blond hair: BA (Oxon), action man, aristocrat to be the one.
That was when she’d had her stroke of luck. There’d been a pencilled note at the bottom of the form with the date of an Oxford v. Cambridge cricket match, 1979, presumably written by the sperm bank technician, no doubt a cricket fan. Sebastian had been enthusing. It was then just a matter of interviewing such cricketers as were still alive to see if they could identify which of their number was likely to have donated sperm anonymously. It had been tedious but not difficult. She had friends.
Five instantly named young Sebastian, in particular a Lord Monty of Castlehaven. Monty remembered the incident well. He even spoke of Sebastian’s poetic genius. ‘Oh the spinning, the spilling, the spurning, the spurting of the spunk!’ After that it was peanuts.
‘I don’t believe a word of it, silly girl’ said Xandra. ‘Where would you find the time?’
‘If you’d ever bothered to visit the chess club you might have found I wasn’t there. They allow five hours a match. I take one.’
‘Off to bed, you little minx,’ said Clive affectionately. He was almost asleep. Rozzie took a phone out from beneath her bra. It was an old Galaxy which Clive had discarded for a newer and better version, but no doubt still had enough surplus recording energy in its guts. The one good thing we had done for her, I could see, was not let her have a smartphone, thus saving her from social media. Or so we had thought.
‘I’ve recorded all this,’ said Rozzi
e. ‘I’ll send you a copy.’
There was a tap on the front door. I went to answer it. It was a very good-looking young man come in search of Rozzie. I had not seen him before but to my reeling brain he looked very like Mercury. All kinds of disordered personality functions were no doubt clustering. Rozzie came out and flashed her Aphrodite smile at him. They went upstairs and came down with suitcases, already packed.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked. ‘You’re underage.’ But of course she wasn’t any more. She was sixteen. She could leave home.
‘Off to claim my heritage,’ she said. ‘I’m his Lordship’s oldest child.’
Part 5
Time For Reflection
I thought back to so many things. I remembered how much younger we’d seemed the day we all sat round sniffing cocaine and Clive had been so happy. His voice had come back loud and clear, after the brief squeaking patch at the clinic when so stressed. Mind you, I’d not been at all sure I liked this new cheerful version of Clive: the familiar old misery with the squeaky voice might have been preferable. Sudden change was always upsetting. But at least neither version of Clive would be able to father Xandra’s baby. Mumps presumably would have happened to both old and new.
Such a vivid scene, the day we’d gone through the brochure together when Clive discovered it in Xandra’s nurse’s cap. It had seemed the obvious answer. A donor. The new Clive was even less likely to believe Dr Vellum’s diagnosis than had the former – how could such a paragon of vocal, broad-shouldered maleness be infertile? It had suited Clive to forget such unpleasantness altogether. And it was important for me that one way and another Xandra must have a baby and soon. The window of opportunity was closing. The clinic could deliver the frozen phial to No. 23. Everyone needed a daughter when you grew older, to go shopping with and keep you company and look after you when you were old.
‘A son is a son till he gets a wife, but a daughter is a daughter the rest of your life.’ Wasn’t that so true! I assumed Xandra would have a girl. I was just lucky, I suppose, that it was, not Flora’s doing. Though I was still well into Hellenism at the time, up and down on my bike to West Hampstead with goodness knows what in the basket.
Clive had even apologised because he’d changed Let’s Get Out of Here! from a stage show back into a novel. As if I cared. We were in the conservatory, eating fish fingers and chips, in rollicking, rolling mode. For once the TV was not on.
‘I’m sorry, Gwinny, I know you did lots of work on it, read it and so forth and were sweet about it and your reaction kept me going but you missed the point. Action beats alone don’t make a stage play. A film perhaps but not stage. I realised that watching the James Bond films. I might have said a few imprudent words to those oafs which I shouldn’t. I think perhaps I did, but I was stressed. But never mind. Everything has changed. The future is mine.’
And he broke into song again with Joseph’s closing number, Any Dream Will Do, while avoiding the very high notes, I noticed. Clive was never lost to all prudence.
When the table was cleared Clive collected a razor blade from the bathroom, took Xandra’s bag and extracted a ten-pound note and her round make-up mirror, onto which he then shook a little plastic packet of white chunky powder, put it on the glass side table and used the razor blade to cut it to sniffable dust. He did all this with style and ceremony.
‘Oh really, Clive,’ said Xandra. ‘That stuff is so dangerous. And I won’t, if you don’t mind. I have to think in the morning.’
‘Expensive, too,’ I said, ‘and no thanks, I have to keep my wits about me.’
‘Sorry about you two misery guts, but I think I deserve a little celebration in the circumstances,’ said Clive, cheerfully enough. He’d met an old mate at the audition and they’d shared some good stuff before they went on – and afterwards they’d bought some: ‘Only a couple of grams and a just couple of hundred quid.’ I winced and Xandra looked at me nervously. She’d be down on the mortgage.
He became more eloquent still as he told Xandra he wouldn’t stand in her way; he knew how badly she needed a baby and he thought she should do it, and soon. He’d do what he could in the way of house-husbanding until his career took off again and Xandra could afford to give up her job and with Gwinny-next-door’s help no doubt they would cope. But Xandra must realise he needed to travel where the work took him, the big musicals, Broadway, Tokyo, Berlin. He might even try serious opera. He’d always wanted to try Turandot. No, it wouldn’t be fair to stand in her way. Their love was a fixed thing, a never wand’ring star. And he’d seen the Brilliant Baby catalogue in her bag earlier (he’d been looking everywhere in her bag for a mirror – more likely the ten-pound note, thought Gwinny – so he knew which way her mind was going) and probably what with the mumps and all it was best. And though Clive would be horribly jealous at least it was a test tube stranger and not his best friend or the kind of sneaky thing a lot of women did in similar circumstances.
Sniff.
I’d succumbed and taken some too.
Snort.
So we all looked through the catalogue of potential fathers together and wondered at the marvels of modern science and new worlds now opening up for us, and Xandra succumbed and sniffed what was left, and all three together were in this state when we ended up choosing the donor who was to be Sebastian, Lord Dilberne. And so we produced Rozzie and got what we deserved.
But it was mostly me. The other two were too busy giggling. And now I knew who the donor is, Lord Sebastian, I can only wonder and worry. I do not worry about Rozzie at all. She is young in years but certainly not in competence and can look after herself all too well. Xandra of course is beside herself with worry, and Clive has phoned a grief therapist for a consultation. But they will get over it.
I worry about Sebastian, wandering about the vastness of 3 Belgrave Square not knowing what’s going to hit him. Should I warn him or should I not? He is a nice man; a family man in his late fifties, quiet and gentle, a touch neurasthenic, with something of a reputation as a violinist, busy with various charities. He has an unmarried son, Dennis, twenty-five, heir to the title and estate, and a daughter, Victoria Hedleigh, aged twenty-eight, a powerful and forthright person, currently campaigning to get the Succession to the Throne Act, 2013 changed to include the nobility as well as royalty, so gender is irrelevant when it comes to inheritance.
I remember my trust in lateral thinking. ‘Don’t raise the bridge, lower the river’. ‘Don’t go to prison, change the law’. She might have it in her mind to go one further, so that babies conceived by sperm had equal rights to those naturally born. In which case heaven help Victoria. But she would be a formidable foe.
And heaven help Sebastian too. The nobility may be richer and snobbier than the rest of us, but in their youth are not necessarily more sensible. The legal and personal ramifications that might possibly ensue were far from his Lordship’s mind. Donation was still anonymous in 1999, but it was not so difficult, if only by claiming a false identity, for his daughter to discover from whose loins she came and play it to her advantage. As her legal father Clive Smithson, writer and house-husband – the two so often go together – now frequently observed, Rozzie was not one to let legality, let alone common decency, stand in her way.
Sebastian was to tell me at one stage that he saw Rozzie, his eldest daughter, as a direct re-run of his own great-great-grandmother, Adela Ripple. Adela, as described to him by his great-aunt Mallory, still going strong (well, as strong as you can be when in your late nineties) in the Dower House of Dilberne Court, had been a monster. Fetching and charming though Adela was, she was an inveterate seductress, an unrivalled social climber, and a born liar, doing great damage to all around with the sweetest of Aphrodite smiles. She had even tried to claim the great-aunts as her own, bypassing their real mother, the saintly Vivien, of whom much has been written. Even as nonagenarians, Mallory and Stella, twins, did not forget or forgive. And as Sebastian says to me sadly from time to time, echoing Gwinny, ‘genes
will out’.
But that’s to come. [Writers’ Huddle: ‘Gwinny, are you sure about all these timeline changes? You may think it’s too late in the novel for readers to close the book, but it never is. Just be careful! Signed Consuela, Group Convenor.’]
Rozzie The Dutiful Daughter
To all outward appearances Rozzie remained a dutiful daughter. She did not blot her copybook. She visited once a month, no doubt having future court appearances in mind. She gave us news of where she was living and what she was doing. She showed her concern for our health and well-being, offered to take Simkins Two to the vet to be put down. But there was always a satirical undertone to everything she did or said.
The first time she came, mid-February, Xandra stopped worrying and Clive cancelled his grief therapist appointment, Rozzie was so affectionate and fond. And I tried to quell my paranoiac disorder cluster, though just because you think everyone is out to get you doesn’t mean they’re not.
But somehow she had managed to make us feel guilty, so when she suggested we gift the freeholds of Nos. 23 and 24 to her we happily did so. You can do this to your children so long as you stay alive for seven years after doing it. But in the meanwhile you are in your children’s power. They can evict you, make you homeless if they want to sell, and leave you helpless in your dotage: but you loved them and you trusted them so what could go wrong? Rozzie had all the necessary documentation with her and sent for Mr Ipswich to witness. He came round like a shot to tell us not to do it.
‘But Rozzie’s our child,’ we said. ‘We trust her implicitly. She’d never harm us in any way.’
‘You’d be surprised what children can do,’ Mr Ipswich said, and regaled us with tales of treachery and woe and how sibling rivalry was as nothing compared to suppressed filial rage.