by Sue Margolis
“Okay, then I’m paying,” Brian said. “I am not about to let you lay out for this. You can’t afford it.”
“Brian, I can manage a few hundred quid. Thanks for the offer, but this is my story, my responsibility. I want to do it.”
“Okay, if you insist,” he said. “You know, if you’re right and it is the Crema Crema Crema that has been causing men to grow moobs, this will make your journalistic career. God, you could find yourself up for a Pulitzer.”
“Let’s just take it one step at a time.” Amy laughed. “Right now, this is nothing but conjecture. We will know nothing until we’ve had the beans analyzed.”
“I know, but just imagine …”
“I am, but I’m scared I’ll jinx it. All we can do is wait.” She paused as a thought occurred to her. “Hey, I left without getting my Prada bag.”
“Don’t worry,” Brian said. “I got you one.”
“You did? Fantastic. Where is it?”
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a six-inch-long pouch made of light brown suede. He handed it to Amy.
“A comb sleeve?” She pulled out a cheap tortoiseshell comb. “That’s what they were making all the fuss about?” She started searching for the Prada logo.
“I’ve looked,” Brian said. “There’s no logo. It’s just a bit of old junk.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
AMY GOT home just after ten. Lilly said Charlie had been as good as gold. He’d gone to bed exactly at eight and hadn’t stirred. “Oh, by the way,” Lilly said, “some flowers came for you. I took them into the kitchen and stood them in a bucket of water.”
Amy went into the kitchen and found a bunch of the most glorious white orchids. There was a card attached: “Thank you so much for having us and for being so wise. Love, Victoria.” There were two kisses.
“My pleasure,” Amy murmured, smiling.
She called a taxi for Lilly, checked on Charlie, and wondered if it was too late to call Victoria. Deciding her sister would probably be up watching Newsnight, Amy dialed her number.
“Hey, thank you so much for the orchids,” Amy said. “They’re beautiful.”
“I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciated you letting us stay … not to mention our little talk. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”
“You know, I’m always here if you need me,” Amy said.
“Thank you. And vice versa. By the way, I’ve made an appointment with a shrink.”
“You have? Well done. I know it couldn’t have been easy.”
“It wasn’t, but as you know, Simon gave me no choice.”
“So how are things with you two?”
“He’s pretty distant. Every time I open my mouth, he just seems to get so angry.”
“You’ve both got a long way to go,” Amy said. “But I’m sure the therapy will help.”
“Maybe.” Victoria didn’t sound too confident.
“So,” Amy said. “Have you spoken to Dad?”
“I have, and he’s adamant that he is going to carry on seeing that woman. He’s completely infatuated. I’m convinced he’s losing his mind. Do you think we should have him tested?”
“Tested? For what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s going senile.”
“Now you’re being ridiculous. Our father is no more senile than you or me. He is in love. I had a long talk with him, and he explained that he has this thing about needing to be needed, and Joyce needs him.”
“What about Mum? Didn’t she need him?”
“According to Dad, not in the same way. He sees Mum as confident and independent and making her own way. He admits he’s a bit of a chauvinist and that he’s probably too old to change.”
“Well, I refuse to speak to Joyce. Simon said she phoned and wants to talk, but I’m having nothing to do with her.”
Amy told Victoria about Joyce going to AA. “She’s so ashamed about what happened. Why don’t you try giving her another chance?”
“No way. Drunk or sober, she’s still a pornmonger, and I will have nothing to do with her.”
“Oh, come on, Victoria.”
“No. Dad can do what he likes, but she ruined Arthur’s party and she ruined my reputation. I can feel everybody laughing behind my back. Look, it’s late. I need to get to bed.”
After everything that had happened that evening, Amy wasn’t surprised she couldn’t sleep. She lay in bed looking up at the ceiling, hands under her head. Suppose, just suppose, Crema Crema Crema coffee beans tested positive for estrogen or for some chemical that mutated into estrogen in the body. She would have a world exclusive on her hands. She would make a name for herself virtually overnight. Editors would be clamoring for her to write for them. She had dreamed of breaking into journalism and becoming successful, but it had never occurred to her that her career would be launched by a story this big. She was reminding herself not to get too carried away, because so far she had proved nothing, when she heard Charlie calling for her.
“All right, sweetie, I’m coming.” She threw back the duvet and reached for her dressing gown.
“What is it?” she said, sitting on the edge of his bed. “Bad dream?”
He gave a vigorous nod of his head. “This huge monster was trying to steal my stuff.”
She assumed that the monster was a metaphor for Arthur.
“That must have been scary. Tell you what, why don’t I read you a few pages of The Twits.”
“K.”
She turned on his bedside light and picked up the book from the nightstand.
He sat up. “Read, read,” he said. It was a refrain left over from when he was a toddler. She looked at his expectant little face. There it was again, the resemblance to Sam.
She read half a dozen pages and then insisted Charlie lie down and try to sleep. He asked her to leave his light on, which she did.
“Night, night, poppet. Sleep tight.”
She went into the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and stood sipping it, her back resting against the sink. She stared into the distance, thinking about nothing much: what to cook for tomorrow’s supper, how she ought to get a laundry load going before bed.
After a few moments, an image of Charlie popped into her head, apparently from nowhere. His smiley face was looking up at her. The resemblance to Sam—that something around the eyes—was obvious. She put the glass down on the drainer. What’s more, they were both talented artists. What if …? The idea was ludicrous. She let out a soft laugh, but the thought persisted. She attempted to drag and drop it into her mental trash, but it refused to budge. She was being forced to consider that the similarities between Charlie and Sam weren’t mere coincidence or a fluke.
By now her thoughts were picking up speed. Her brain was making what had to be crazy, illogical leaps and connections, but since she was the only person around to point this out, she didn’t much care. She had a feeling in her gut, and she needed to test it.
She went into the living room, picked her laptop up off the coffee table, and took it to the sofa. Aware that this could turn out to be quite a day for revelations, she Googled “frozen sperm life span.”
Chapter 14
BY NOW AMY’S heart was racing. It had taken her roughly ten seconds to discover that sperm, properly frozen, could live indefinitely.
But Sam had donated his sperm in Manchester. She had been inseminated in London at the Abbotswood Clinic. She Googled it. No website came up, just links to newspaper articles, all several years old. She clicked on one from The Guardian. It seemed that the company that owned the clinic had gone into liquidation six months or so after Charlie was born. Amy knew nothing about this. Not that her ignorance came as a surprise. In that first year after Charlie was born, what little spare time she had was spent catching up on her sleep. She certainly didn’t spend it reading the newspaper.
Nor had she had any idea that the clinic—which, when she was trying to conceive Charlie, still had an excellent re
putation—had been run by an incompetent, bungling medical staff and managers who lost patients’ notes and confused sperm batches. The clinic’s downfall came when, on one notorious occasion, a doctor implanted a “white” embryo into a black mother. After the birth, she successfully sued the parent company and it went down, taking with it two other clinics that had been under its control. One was in Newcastle. The other, St. Bernadette’s, was in Manchester. Amy had no doubt that this was where Sam had donated sperm. She remembered him telling her how weird it had felt jerking off in a converted Catholic church.
One more piece of information caught Amy’s eye. All three clinics had been caught scamming sperm donors by telling them they were infertile when they weren’t. That way the clinic held on to the perfectly healthy sperm but didn’t have to pay the donors. Why didn’t Sam know any of this? The article said that the directors of the parent company went to prison for fraud. There would have been a court case. Then the penny dropped. The scandal became public knowledge around the time Sam was working in Africa. Lawyers or officials trying to let him know that he might not be sterile, after all, wouldn’t have been able to find him.
She took a deep breath. The St. Bernadette’s and Abbotswood clinics had been owned by the same company. Was it possible that as the need arose, sperm was transferred from one clinic to the other? Was it possible that through a mixture of blunders and dishonesty, Charlie’s father—instead of being a six-foot, blond-haired, blue-eyed athlete—was in fact Sam?
She got no more than three or four hours of sleep that night. The next morning Charlie had to wake her. She went through her early-morning routine with him, doing her best not to let him see how preoccupied and troubled she was.
On her way to work, she thought about pouring everything out to Brian, but when she arrived, she could see he was consumed with the Crema Crema Crema story, which by rights she should have been, too. After all, if something in Crema Crema Crema was causing his moobs, then—assuming no permanent harm had been done to the men who had ingested it—the panic was over.
“Okay, I’m not drinking any more Crema Crema Crema,” Brian said by way of greeting, “or selling it in the café until we have the test results. So, have you found a lab yet?”
“Bri, I didn’t get home until after ten last night.”
He shooed her into the kitchen and told her to start Googling labs on his laptop. She protested, saying that there were cakes to be sliced and ciabatta rolls to be filled, but he insisted that he and Zelma could manage on their own for a bit. “When you’ve found a lab, I’ll deliver the beans in my car.” He paused. “You look knackered. You okay?”
“Fine. I just didn’t sleep very well.”
“Me neither. I guess we’ve let all this excitement get to us.”
“What excitement? Nobody’s told me about any excitement.” It was Zelma. She had just walked in and was heading toward the counter where Brian and Amy were standing.
“I’ll explain in a sec,” Brian said. He turned to Amy. “Now off you go. I’ll bring you a cuppa and a croissant to wake you up.”
It took over an hour of phone calls before Amy found a food-testing laboratory prepared to analyze the coffee beans. Most of them didn’t take on work from private individuals. The one lab prepared to help said they were snowed under with work. There had been an E. coli outbreak in half a dozen schools and several hospitals in South London—which Amy had read about in the papers—and it would be weeks rather than days before they could get around to testing the coffee. Brian said the waiting was going to drive him crazy. Amy said it wasn’t going to do much for her blood pressure, either, but they had no choice other than to go with these people, not least of all because they appeared to have an excellent reputation.
Brian said he would drop a bag of coffee beans off at the lab, which was only a few miles away in Wimbledon, as soon as the morning rush was over.
“Great,” Amy said. “But I haven’t given the lab any idea what this is about. I haven’t mentioned moobs or estrogen. If we alert people there, somebody might tip off the press and we could end up losing the story.”
At that point Zelma came into the kitchen to collect a carrot cake and said that it was like Watergate all over again and that when they made the film, she wanted her part to be played by Barbra or Bette.
Amy said she would bear that in mind.
THAT EVENING, Amy and Charlie went to Bel’s for an early supper. Bel loved to cook and kept going on about how Amy hadn’t been around for ages, but what with Bel dumping Jurassic Mark and getting into a new relationship, not to mention all the anxiety and effort she put into her voice-over auditions, it hadn’t happened.
On top of all that, Bel’s life had become even more complicated. She hadn’t gotten up the courage to dump Ulf. “How can I possibly chuck him?” she kept asking Amy. “He’s so sweet and kind. What’s more, he adores me. It would break his heart.”
Amy made the point that if Bel carried on like this, she would end up marrying a man simply because she felt sorry for him and then it would be her heart, not to mention her spirit, that would be broken.
“I know. I will do it. I just don’t know when.” The words had become Bel’s mantra, but she did nothing.
Tonight Ulf was in Dublin, giving a lecture on nonmalignant brain tumors, and for once Bel was feeling relatively calm, as her James Bond audition was still a couple of weeks away.
Bel lived in Southfields, a short bus ride from Amy, in what had once been a railway worker’s cottage. It was a bit shabby, but the rent was low and the landlord had no problem with her decorating the place.
Bel had taken that as her cue to put her own stamp on it. Nearly all the walls were painted bright pink, and she had orange sofas, green cushions, and strings of brightly colored beads instead of doors. Charlie said that going to Bel’s made him feel happy. What made him happier still was the TV she had in the bedroom. Charlie’s special treat was being allowed onto the high cast-iron bed, where, propped up against Bel’s fancy brocade cushions, he would watch cartoons and eat junk.
This evening, now that they’d finished their spaghetti and meatballs, he was doing just that. Amy and Bel were still at the table, finishing their wine and munching on salad remains.
“I don’t think I ever mentioned,” Amy said, breaking a brief silence, “that when Sam was a student at Manchester Uni, he donated sperm at a local clinic.”
“Really? Huh … Actually, I knew several guys who did it when they were hard up. Must be odd to think that you’ve got kids running around that you don’t know. And what if two of them met years later and fell in love? … God, there’s a film in that.”
Amy decided to come straight out with it. “If it’s a rom-com plot you’re after, I’ve got a better one than that.”
Bel frowned a question.
“Call me mad, but I think Sam could be Charlie’s father.”
“You’re mad.”
“Maybe.”
“What are you basing this on? The fact that the two of them look a bit alike and Sam was once a sperm donor? Come on.”
“Actually, the clinic said he was sterile.”
“Omigod. Now I’m starting to think you really are mad.”
“Just hear me out.”
“Okay,” Bel said when Amy had finished presenting her case, “but even if there has been some huge cock-up—pardon the pun—and Sam is Charlie’s father, why would the clinic hang on to Sam’s sperm for eight years before using it?”
“The staff was incompetent. Why wouldn’t they?”
Bel shrugged. “Maybe you’re right.” She didn’t say anything for a moment or two. “Amy, don’t take this the wrong way, but do you think it’s possible that this is all wishful thinking and you actually just want Sam to be Charlie’s father?”
“Maybe that’s part of it. I can’t think of anything I’d love more than to discover that Sam is Charlie’s father. If I had to nominate a dad for him, it would be Sam, but at the same time,
I really don’t think my heart is ruling my head. You have to admit that there is a genuine possibility that Sam is Charlie’s father.”
Bel gave a shrug. “The whole thing sounds totally crazy, but I guess it’s possible. So, have you told Sam?”
“No.”
“Why ever not? This is about him. He has a right to know.”
“I know, but on the other hand, if we do a DNA test and it turns out that he is Charlie’s dad, he might feel he has to propose or suggest we start living together as a family. The last thing I want him to feel is obligated.”
“But Sam has already said he’s in love with you.”
“No, he said he thinks he is falling for me. There’s a difference. It’s like he hasn’t quite reached the point of no return.”
“But you have reached that point? You love him?”
“Yes. I think I do.”
“Amy, he has the right to know all of this—how you feel about him and that you think he could be Charlie’s father.”
“I know, but I can’t do it. I have to wait and see if he comes out and says the L word. That way, I know that if he decides to stay, it will be because he loves me as well as Charlie.”
JUNE TURNED into July. Amy was still waiting to hear from the food lab.
The last time she phoned to hurry them up, they apologized profusely for taking so long and promised that the coffee beans were next on their list. By now Brian had lost his patience and was all for finding another lab. Amy, who was finding it only marginally easier to contain her frustration, was determined to stay with the one she had chosen, purely because it had such a good reputation.
By now Brian as well as Bel knew about the possibility that Sam could be Charlie’s father. Her friends kept on at her to tell him, but Amy was holding out, waiting for Sam to tell her he loved her. By now he was spending more time with Amy and Charlie. On the weekends, when the weather was fine, they went on picnics. They flew kites on Primrose Hill, took trips to the zoo and Legoland.