Cuckoo

by Wendy Perriam

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/wendyperriam

  Contents

  Wendy Perriam

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Wendy Perriam

  Cuckoo

  Wendy Perriam

  Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

  Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’

  Dedication

  For Vicky Wilmot

  Thanks for fifteen years of Mind-mixing!

  Epigraph

  Then wonder not to see this soul extend

  The bounds, and seek some other self, a friend: …

  For ’tis the bliss of Friendship’s holy state

  To mix their Minds and to communicate.

  John Dryden Eleonora

  Chapter One

  Typical of Charles to decant his sperm sample into a Fortnum and Mason’s jar. Empty of course, but it had once contained gentleman’s relish, and Charles was, if nothing else, a gentleman; one who had better things to do than mess about taking freshly-decanted semen up to Harley Street. He had a more pressing appointment – negotiating the revision of a multi-million oil contract in Bahrain. No wonder they hadn’t had a baby. Charles was never in England at the right time of the month. He’d be streaking over the Med by now, sipping cocktails on Concorde, while she strap-hung on the tube.

  The train jolted, suddenly, and Frances lurched forward. It seemed strange to be travelling on the tube again, struggling in the rush hour, but without her job, carrying a scant two milligrams of her husband’s seed instead of a bulging briefcase. She almost hankered after those old, punctilious, nine-to-five days (more often nine-to-seven), with her thick-pile office and her chromium-plated secretary, when she’d solved problems by her own application and initiative, instead of waiting on the whim of Mother Nature. Conceiving a baby was proving the biggest hurdle in an otherwise effortless career. She had even ditched the career, to make it easier. But the in-tray in her womb stayed strictly empty.

  A man got off at Charing Cross and she slid into his seat. She felt she had a right to it, not pregnant (yet), but carrying the stuff of life. She cupped her hands more firmly round the jar, shrouded in its paper bag. It would be blasphemous to drop it, after what Charles had been through to produce those vital drops.

  He’d sidled into the bathroom that morning, with the empty jar concealed beneath the Investor’s Chronicle and The Financial Times, and remained there, in nerve-racking silence, for close on an hour. She had tried to concentrate on his breakfast, crisping the bacon the way he liked it and squeezing Spanish oranges into cut-glass tumblers, over ice. She had made the tea, heated the croissants, sorted his letters into Urgent, Personal and Dross. Still no husband.

  She had opened her own mail, to try to pass the time – an invitation to speak on ‘Women In Publicity’ at the Graphics Society September meeting; the pick-of-the-month from Classics Choice (Riccardo Muti’s recording of the Cherubini Requiem); a begging letter from ‘Save The Seal’; a plea from the Residents’ Association to use her house and services for their Christmas jamboree. She tossed them to one side. Even without her career, her life was still nine to seven. She was busy, committed, conscientious. Yet, somehow, it all meant nothing. If she had written a begging letter on her own behalf, all it would have asked for was a baby.

  Slowly, she walked upstairs to the bathroom and listened a moment outside the locked door. Silence. No heavy breathing, no rhythmic creaking. Not even a tap running, or the cistern flushing, to indicate completion and success.

  ‘Can I – er – lend a hand?’ she called.

  ‘No thanks.’ He sounded as if he were refusing the garrotte, or a term’s hard labour in Siberia. He couldn’t be anywhere near it, with a tombstone voice like that. And why be so damned independent? The doctor had suggested that she more or less do it for him, yet he wouldn’t even let her in the bathroom.

  She mooched downstairs again. The croissants had shrivelled, the tea was over-stewed. She sat at the table, staring at the tasteful hessian wall, torturing the empty orange skins into a shredded, soggy mess of peel. It was absurd to be so tense, but that sample was desperately important. She had endured all the tests herself and had been pronounced in perfect working order. But Charles had resisted. He wasn’t the type to take his trousers down before even the most eminent of Harley Street physicians, let alone entrust his semen to tin-pot laboratory technicians who had taken sandwich courses at provincial polytechnics. Charles was a snob, even when it came to a sperm count. He should have had one years ago. She was already in her thirties – there wasn’t time to go on relying merely on chance, or luck, or the inexorable vigour of the Life Force. He’d only agreed at all after watching a documentary on artificial insemination, where one of the donors was a drop-out on the dole.

  Perhaps she’d been too insistent. She was all too aware of the demands and pressures of his job. Sometimes, there wasn’t even time for routine sex, let alone infertility investigations. Charles’ life was perpetual overtime. But if he didn’t produce that sample, they might as well give up. He was so damned proud, he’d never try again. It was bad enough not conceiving in the first place. Fathering a child was something elementary. Any school leaver could do it, in a ten-minute tea-break, so why not Charles Parry Jones Esquire, MA (Cantab.), FCA?

  Frances bit into a burnt corpse of a croissant and put it down again. It seemed sacrilegious to eat, when Charles was struggling with his half of the reproductive process. Or was he? Knowing her husband, he was more likely to be poised on the lavatory, writing
a report on Prophylactic Cash Flow Analysis. He hated wasting time. Even at breakfast, he dictated his letters into a tape recorder between mouthfuls of poached egg, and he’d spent a fortune on sleep tapes. Charles rarely had a dream – he was too busy with ‘Beginner’s Sanskrit’, or plugged into ‘Budgetary Control for Micro-computers’. Sometimes, she wondered if he even wanted children. A keen prospective father wouldn’t take an hour to produce a teaspoonful of sperm.

  She picked up his Urgent pile of letters, the largest of the three, and weighed it in her hands. ‘Urgent’ meant business. Charles’ work was like a barrier between them. Of course she admired his zeal and energy, his never-failing enterprise, but why couldn’t he devote a little time to his future son and heir, rather than lavish it exclusively on the tax and investment problems of the Western hemisphere? If he couldn’t even masturbate without using the other hand to write a memorandum, then she and their relationship came a very poor second to Messrs Caxton, Clarke and Parry Jones. And the poor unborn infant would be lucky if it even came third. She’d been prodded and poked a score of times in the cause of procreation, poured out libations of blood and urine without complaining, and here was Charles baulking at a trifling sperm sample.

  Perhaps the atmosphere was wrong. Shiny white tiles and an impending flight to Bahrain weren’t the most suitable setting for sexual success. She was always nervous herself about him flying, even now, when he boarded Concorde as casually as if it were a country bus. There were so many risks to a man in his position – a crash, a coronary, a kidnapping, a hijack. He was such a solid character, if anything happened to him, the world would crumble in sympathy. She felt strangely light and insubstantial when he was away, as if part of her had been amputated. Sometimes, she wondered if she even existed, except as his reflection. Was that why she wanted a child? A Charles in miniature? He was a big man, in every sense, and had never been a baby himself – you could tell. He’d sprung into the world fully grown, with a schedule in one hand and a computer in the other.

  Frances switched on the radio and tuned from Thought For The Day to Morning Concert. Neville Marriner was conducting Elgar. She turned him up louder. Perhaps the Enigma Variations would reach Charles in the bathroom and return him to the task in hand.

  ‘Christ, Frances! Did you notice how Marriner dawdled through that first variation? Elgar took it twice as fast, when he conducted.’

  Charles had emerged, looking enigmatic and impeccable. Six foot of navy pin-stripe, topped by a lean, pale face, with surprisingly full lips. The mouth seemed out of character with the rest of him. It was too sensuous, too curving. Everything else about him was thin and stern. Charles was a straight line. He never slouched nor sprawled. No paunch, no bulges, no moral kinks. Frances glanced at his face – it was utterly composed. No flushed cheeks, no air of achievement. Not even the jar.

  ‘Nice bacon,’ he grunted. ‘It’s the Cullen’s isn’t it?’

  She found the sample, later, on the bathroom sill, concealed behind the Harpic: a few oozy gobbets of greyish phlegm, already congealing in its jar. Could that be life material, half-way to a baby? What a messy, complicated business reproduction was! No wonder Charles was hostile. He liked things to be orderly, and if they weren’t, he made them so, forged or forced them into shape. He’d have preferred to have a baby computer-fashion, feeding in the relevant information and masterminding a safe, no-nonsense, fully automated, remote-control delivery, without all the mess and fuss of haphazard sperm and elusive ova.

  Frances gazed around the crowded carriage of the underground. All those seething people were almost proof of nature’s random method. Their parents hadn’t had test-tubes or computers. World population stood at some four and a half thousand million at the present. That meant four and a half thousand million spermatozoa had successfully found an egg and fused with it. Not to mention all the countless million others, in preceding centuries. Why should Charles’ sperm be so recalcitrant? She opened the Fortnum’s bag a crack and stared at the curdled junket at the bottom of the jar. Was something wrong with it? Did it have its own, conservative ideas about procreation or world population control? Or was it simply proud and stubborn, like its owner, too fastidious to scramble up slimy cervix walls into the hurly burly of the womb?

  She steadied the jar on her lap, fanned herself with her still unopened copy of The Times. The train was stiflingly hot and had unaccountably stopped between Oxford Circus and Regent’s Park. If there were a breakdown on the line, the sperm would die and the infertility investigations come to a screeching halt. None of the passengers spoke, few even bothered to look up from their newspapers. She fumed at their impassivity. They might have time to wrestle with the crossword half the morning, or goggle at Page Three, but she most certainly did not. Mr Rathbone had stressed how important it was that she didn’t hang about. Sperms were like goldfish – they perished when out of their natural element. She closed her eyes and willed the train to move. It didn’t. She wondered if she could sue London Transport for the murder of four hundred million spermatozoa. Veritable genocide. Rathbone had told her that was the number in just one ejaculate. No wonder women always felt inferior. They simply didn’t operate on that overwhelming scale. The carriage shuddered, sighed, jolted forward twenty yards, then stopped.

  ‘Murderer!’ she muttered.

  The train let out a screech of protest and revved into motion, rattling and pounding into Regent’s Park Station. Frances leapt out with her jar.

  ‘Splendid, splendid, Mrs Parry!’ chuntered Mr Rathbone, as she almost collided with him in the Harley Street laboratory. He always called her plain Mrs Parry, without the Jones. She wasn’t sure if he were merely absent-minded, or whether he did it in the interests of brevity, or vaguely democratic bonhomie. He looked far too respectable and avuncular to be a gynaecologist, trespassing among women’s private parts and messing about with Fallopian tubes and foetuses. He had short, no-nonsense grey hair, combed strictly to one side, and half-moon spectacles. He shook her hand, whisked the jar away, and closeted himself with two technicians and a microscope.

  Frances sat and waited, leafing despondently through Country Life. Whatever Rathbone’s pronouncement, there was going to be a problem. If Charles’ sperm were deficient, he would never forgive himself, nor her for proving it. She wasn’t sure if she’d forgive him, either. But even if it were entirely satisfactory, they were still no nearer having a baby.

  Rathbone returned, looking flushed and jubilant, as if he had just given birth himself.

  ‘Well?’ said Frances.

  ‘Very much alive and kicking! No problems there. Want to look?’

  Frances moved into the inner room. It seemed impertinent to be prying into Charles’ emissions, when he was captive on an aeroplane. She looked. Hundreds of tiny punctuation marks were writhing under the microscope, leaping and lunging in an ecstatic John Travolta dance.

  ‘Are you sure that’s Charles’ sample? I mean, you haven’t muddled it up with someone else’s, have you?’ Charles was such a controlled and sober person, it seemed most unlikely that he should harbour such giddy, madcap sperm.

  Mr Rathbone smiled his eighteen-carat smile. ‘No doubt at all, my dear. Your husband’s semen is eminently satisfactory. There’s clearly nothing wrong on his side.’

  Frances sat down suddenly. She was glad, yes of course she was. It was unthinkable that Charles should be defective, even in a sperm count. Charles never failed. He’d won the form prize every year at Radley and then gone on to get a highly satisfactory 2/1 at Cambridge. He’d come third out of twelve hundred candidates in his accountancy examinations and he could play Liszt’s Harmonies Poétiques without even looking at the music. A man of that calibre simply wouldn’t produce sub-standard spermatozoa. So why did she feel disappointed, resentful even? Did she want him to fail? She hated failures just as much as he did. She had married him precisely because he outshone her in everything, and that wasn’t always easy. She had a degree herself, a good one, but
it wasn’t Oxbridge. They’d met at a golf competition – the Pearson Mixed Foursomes – but her handicap was double his. They both spoke French, but Charles’ accent was almost imperceptible. They both liked art, but Charles could tell a Canaletto from a Guardi at a glance, even from the back of the gallery. And he wasn’t even smug. He was too serious for that.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s my fault.’ Frances swung her handbag angrily against the chair.

  ‘We don’t talk about faults, my dear. And, as you know, all your own tests were completely satisfactory.’

  ‘Well, what is it then? We’ve been trying long enough. I’ve been following your instructions like the Bible.’

  Rathbone clasped his hands together, as if he were praying. ‘Call it Factor X, if you like. Something mysterious we can’t put our finger on. In ten per cent of all cases we investigate, we find absolutely nothing wrong. It might be the colour of your eyes, the weather, the type of book you read …’

  ‘Mr Rathbone, I’d appreciate it if you could take this subject seriously.’ They paid him enough, for heaven’s sake, and all he could do was produce idiotic jokes.

  ‘But I am serious, my dear. I’m often amazed myself at the oddities of medical science.’ Rathbone shifted his gaze to the leather-bound blotter on his desk. ‘Some women are actually allergic to their own husband’s semen. They make immune bodies to it, as if it were an invading germ. We don’t know a lot about it, but it’s one of the subjects being kicked about by the boffins at the moment.’

  ‘You mean a woman who’s perfectly fertile might simply not conceive because she and her husband were – well – sort of biologically incompatible?’

  ‘That’s it exactly. And if the same woman had intercourse with a different man, one whose semen she accepted, she might very well get pregnant.’