Even when I became pregnant I still looked. The truth is, I still look now sometimes. I’ve never stopped looking or searching, even though during the last sixteen years there have been long periods of time when I haven’t caught myself doing it. But your mother, I’m afraid, has a fundamental and incurable habit of looking at other men. This year, these last few months, I’ve felt the need to look a lot. And even when I don’t look, I still wonder. The more years that have gone by, in fact, the more reason there is to wonder. Suppose our paths have crossed, suppose we’ve actually looked, without knowing it, at each other. Suppose we’ve sat on the same train. What would be the chances? Beyond all reckoning? Sometimes, now, I have the strangely arresting thought: suppose he’s no longer alive.
But, assuming he is, he’s out there somewhere. Even now.
Do you see why I needed—I know it’s the most exotic of excuses—my fling, if that’s the word, with Alan Fraser? Not that it’s actually stopped those supposings. Not that it’s exorcised the ghost. And, of course, I can’t prevent myself having the reverse notion, on his, the ghostly one’s, behalf, though I know it’s absurd: that he’s interested in me. Or in us, I should say.
As if in this one case (how many other poor mums, after all, might he have serviced?) the iron rule has been broken and he’s had the privilege of knowing who we are. He’s been watching us all this time, unseen himself—from some special gallery. He even knows that tomorrow’s the big day. He’s been spying on us all these years, this happy family. Spying and perhaps waiting. He’s been counting the “last times” too: the “last” Christmas, your dad’s fiftieth—the last birthday of a so far successful impostor. He was outside that restaurant we took your dad to in January, peering in through the window at our table. He’s out there right now, poor man, getting soaked in the rain and waiting for the dawn of this day: his big day, in a way. He’ll be peering in at us tomorrow, perhaps, through the French windows, from behind the viburnum bush. Or—God help us—he might just crash through the French windows and make his sudden, dramatic, sopping-wet entrance.
Your real father, my demon lover.
I suppose Mike’s had all these thoughts too. He must have done, I’m sure of it. And what would the two of them do if they should come face to face? What would you want them to do? Shake hands, hug each other? Take a swing at each other?
And, of course, when I’ve done my looking on the Tube, walking along Piccadilly, wherever, I’ve been consciously looking in a way—given that vetting process—for Mike’s double, or something close to it. Another Mikey, a pseudo-Mikey, a quasi-Mikey, catching my eye for a fraction of a second, but not even recognizing me.
Isn’t it astonishing that your dad’s still asleep?
A third party entered our lives, a little before you did. Then he became, in due course, a sort of fifth party. Tomorrow he’ll be officially recognised as such, like a christening. From tomorrow you’ll know him about as well as we ever did, but it will be up to you, it has to be up to you, to decide how we should deal with him.
A third party entered your parents’ lives. A fourth party, if you count Otis, who I haven’t forgotten. And, just as with Otis, we had to find a name for him, a token, working name, since he came under that plain wrapping of anonymity. We didn’t even have a number. Not that we wanted or needed, in those early days, to refer to him that much.
Except, perhaps, to thank him.
Yes, to thank him. Will you possibly look at it that way too tomorrow? Even consider it at all, that you might like to thank him? The trouble is, that only begs that other enormous but entirely understandable question: that you might like to meet him. That’s impossible, though it may not stop you wishing it. It’s impossible now as it was back then even to get a simple message of thanks through to him. There are no channels. And how do you thank someone, in any case, whose name you don’t even know?
Tomorrow you may feel the need to give him a name of your own. It’s not such a small matter. You’ll have to use it for the rest of your lives. And perhaps we shouldn’t even mention to you the name we’ve used. Or we should humbly and graciously trade it in for yours. We thought of calling him many things: “Mr. D.,” for example, for “Mr. Donor.” Though that was tricky because “D.” might also stand for “Dad.” Your dad (what a mountain there is in such a little word) came up with some inventive and truculent offerings of his own, which may not be so amusing to you. Such as “The Grand Inseminator” and “Spunky Jim.” But in the end we settled on a formula that was neat and wholly to the point: Mr. S., short for Mr. Sperm.
25
AND, OF COURSE, I can see him in you. I don’t have to look for him randomly in the street, on trains. He’s there before my eyes, invisibly, every time I look at you. And from tomorrow, I’m sure, that mirror-gazing of yours will suddenly get rather serious.
You don’t have grey-blue eyes. You have, as has often been innocently observed, your mother’s dark brown, green-shot eyes, her nose, her cheekbones: but your father’s mobile mouth, your father’s expressions. Despite those specifications we made, it would seem that it was my genes, predominantly, that kicked in. Your dad has clear-blue eyes. We ordered them certainly, the same again, please. So you should know that Mr. Sperm, or whatever you choose to call him, has blue eyes too. But it didn’t work out that way, you got my eyes. Which didn’t stop people from saying, as if the other fifty per cent must be glowingly apparent somewhere else: Ah, but that’s their dad’s smile.
This is the strangest thing—how you’ve conspired, yourselves, in the conspiracy. People see what they expect to see, so why should they not have believed they were seeing Mike in you? Then again, from the start, you saw two faces looming over you that you took to be your parents, and why should you not have taken them as your model? And we did a lot of smiling over you, believe me. But perhaps it was Mike’s smile that got imprinted, perhaps it was his you felt the greater obligation to.
If we’ve performed a part for sixteen years, then, without knowing it, so have you—and even more convincingly. There have definitely been times—whole lengths of time—when we ourselves have fallen totally for the illusion, when we’ve completely forgotten. You’ve been unwittingly such consummate actors, such consummate accomplices, that now it’s like an extra cruelty that you’ll have to undo it all.
And yet I’ve noticed already that it’s started to slip, it’s already started to look less plausible. You’re sixteen, you want to be yourselves. The last thing you want to look like is your half-century-old parents. The last thing you want to do—it’s perfectly natural at your age—is catch yourselves mimicking some fossilised gesture of ours. Will this help matters or just confuse them tomorrow?
These days, you don’t even want to look like each other. But wasn’t that, from the start, the little unexpected marvel that helped fool everyone? We couldn’t have bargained for it, and certainly couldn’t have specified it when we put in our request list. But people simply, perhaps, mistook the one thing for the other, or the one thing distracted from the other. Of course there was consistency and resemblance here, of course you must look like us, because you looked so much like each other.
When we took those holidays down in Cornwall, you were perhaps at the very peak of your symbiosis, your two-peas-in-a-podness: a little team of two acting as one, wanting no other company. It’s what everyone else would notice, your happy, frolicking duality. And so, by a simple process of completing the square, they’d acknowledge our immaculateness as a family.
But I would notice your differences, your imbalances. A mother sees things. I would often see how you were like your father (Mike, of course, I mean), or I would see how the illusion was achieved. Nick, you were always that fraction behind your sister, you waited on her initiative, her shelter. When the two of you ran across the beach, your feet making little sand-puffs, her shoulder was always just ahead of yours, you were tucked in her slipstream, like birds in formation. She learnt to swim first, but as soon as sh
e did, so did you. The same with bicycles.
It seemed to me, Nick, though it’s a big thing to say, I know, that you always relied on Kate to hold your world together. And that while Kate was simply happy and though you might be happy too, a small voice inside you was always saying: please, Kate, don’t let this stop, please don’t let this come to an end. The world was always a question for you, and a possible disaster, hingeing on your sister. Was this my imagination?
But this all had more than one source, I could see that too. You had a special frown, just a tiny knot, a question mark in the middle of your brow, which could appear sometimes, oddly, just when everything else was sunny. But then it wasn’t your frown. It was your father’s. I mean Mike’s. It was the special frown he’d have, and had never had before you were born, whenever he’d remind himself of the fact, whenever he’d stop forgetting and say to himself: but this isn’t what it seems, this can’t go on for ever.
Which way round did it work, Nick? You borrowed it from him? He took it from you? But there it was, on both of you, a father-and-son resemblance: both of you disturbed by happiness. Not your father’s smile, actually, but his frown. I’d see Mike sometimes reach out and for no apparent reason, Nick, put his hand on your brow, as if feeling for a fever. How my pulse would rush. But you must surely remember this yourself. I could see him wanting to smooth away that little obstinate pucker, to take it away in his palm. How could he not be your father when he wanted to touch and reclaim that little mark of himself in you?
Those holidays in Cornwall, midway through this sixteen-year period, when for whole days, weeks long we’d all be so close, were like some almost believable high point for me, the very sun and sea and air colluding, like some annual process of kindly weathering, to mould and fuse us together. By the same token, I think Mike always thought they threatened to expose us. All of us there in just our swimming things. It will be on one of these holidays, I think he thought, in the middle of our August happiness, that the whole thing will somehow come apart, get dashed to bits, like a Cornish shipwreck. That cottage where we regularly stayed, Gull Cottage, with its hollyhocks and lavender bushes and its ship’s-steering-wheel mirror and sand getting everywhere, reminded him, too, of Craiginish Croft (that trapped essence inside): another paradise waiting to be lost.
And on that terrible day when something even worse (there could be) than those fears of his nearly happened, perhaps you noticed, if you were able to notice, that his relief, his joy, his sheer emotion when it was over, was even greater than mine. If we were both of us off the scale.
I don’t mean that I didn’t feel exactly the same: the worst thing that could ever happen and it hadn’t. Oh, my angels. But I didn’t, I couldn’t have the second thought that he was having, even as he struggled to get back his breath. That you were saved, you were still there and it was beyond words, but—one day—he was going to lose you anyway.
Perhaps tomorrow in fact.
Perhaps tomorrow you’ll simply relive that day again. It will come back to you—has it ever gone away?—and it will be your answer. The worst day, until this one that’s coming, of your lives. You’ll see him again swimming towards you. I wasn’t able to see his face then as it would have looked to you, as it came towards you. I wasn’t able to see the expression on it. But how could that man not have been your father?
Or perhaps you’ll remember how that day began: with your pretence, your foolish meddling with our terror and joy. And you didn’t know the half of it. Perhaps tomorrow, on top of that cold returning memory, you’ll have the sudden freezing thought that if the very worst had happened that day and you’d disappeared for ever, then, of course, you’d never have known what you must know now. The lie would have had no end.
I don’t want to think about it either.
Mike’s going to be the outcast tomorrow? Or simply the one, now, you’ll have to rescue?
But spare a thought for your mother. Why do people have children? Why did Grannie Helen get herself pregnant in all that haste? In one sense the haste wasn’t necessary. After the war Grandpa Pete was still there, and there too, luckily for me, was Mike. But now, of course—there has to come a time some time—Grandpa Pete isn’t there.
If Grandma Helen still wants to see Grandpa Pete, or see a living bit of him, there’s only one thing she can do. She can look (not now, of course) at this man lying next to me. I can’t hold that against her, but it’s one of the reasons I’m afraid of her, and it’s one of the reasons, but not the main one—a secondary worry sprouting from a secondary worry—why I’m afraid of the Gifford Park. If your dad should really get it into his head to go traipsing off those few miles to see her, for Sunday morning coffee, to take her to lunch, even, at the Star in Birle, it will be the first time we see her since we’ll have told you. Are you with me?
But this is something that never occurred to your dad and me—though, God knows, we tried to think of everything—when we went along to discuss it all at the clinic. We were simply younger then. When you look at yourselves in the mirror tomorrow you’ll be doing for the first time something that I’ve done, over and over again, when I’ve looked at you. That is, there’ll be someone, when you look, who you won’t see, and now you’ll know it. When I look at you, I don’t see, I can’t see your father. What does that matter? I can just look at him. But think again, though you’re only sixteen. Think of that day in Cornwall.
When your dad looks at you, it’s a simple, patent fact: he can see me. In you, Kate, of course, especially. I’m not trying to flatter myself. He can even see me when I was younger than I am now, though your dad never knew me when I was sixteen.
I’m the one who’s alone in this respect. I ask you to consider it, and I won’t skirt around it any longer. If Mike were suddenly not to be here, I wouldn’t have anywhere to look. I wouldn’t be like Grannie Helen. I wouldn’t have that age-old shred of consolation of looking at you and knowing that you were his too.
Think of it: as a couple gets older there’s only one, unspoken question. But perhaps the two of you, being what you are, have known this all your lives and from the very start. Who will go first? Who will it be? And how can it be?
Don’t worry, we’ve no intention. We’re only forty-nine and fifty. These days, that’s still young, isn’t it? We’re spring chickens. But I can’t see him in you. I want you to remember it: all I have and ever will have of this man here I call your father—and it’s more than I can ever say—is bound up in this sleeping body next to me now. Understand that tomorrow.
26
TO COME BACK to that time when he was sitting in the car park and I was inside having congress with—Mr. S. Your father must have wondered how many more times he might have to do this, to go through this weird, supportive but extraneous ritual, waiting for me to emerge through the glass doors. But I was lucky second time around, which is lucky indeed. The frozen and preserved stuff, they rather tactlessly tell you, simply isn’t as reliable as the fresh. But I only needed two goes—two goes, I’ve sometimes thought, for the two of you, but, of course, it doesn’t work like that.
I learnt I was pregnant that October. But even before that Otis had entered his slow and final decline. Perhaps he’d never truly recovered, though under Alan Fraser’s care it had seemed that he had and one explanation (though it was mainly your father’s) for his eventual deterioration was that when Fraser moved to his new practice, Otis was simply left without proper veterinary care. The new incumbent, Myers, according to your dad at least, was frankly not up to much.
All this pains me, of course. Your dad genuinely got on with Fraser. He would vie with me to be the one to take Otis along for his check-ups and injections—and for the friendly chats. I admit that after my night at the Gifford Park I was quite happy for your dad to take on that role exclusively. It was hardly likely that Fraser (I’ll call him that now) was going to own up to your father. On the other hand, I can see that he might constantly have feared that your dad, having had my confessi
on, might one day turn up, with or without Otis, and deliver some unpleasant comeuppance. So he made his exit that July.
That’s all rather far-fetched, I know. It puts me at the root of it all—the sly bitch pitting one man’s ignorance against another man’s guesswork. That was hardly my position. I’m not even sure if I cared that much. Remember, I was now concentrating on becoming your mother. That was my position. I’d put myself, with all the guesswork that can entail, in the hands of a fertility clinic.
It’s entirely possible that Fraser’s sudden departure had nothing to do with Mr. and Mrs. Hook. Though I wasn’t sorry, by then, to see him go. The plain truth is he’d served his non-veterinary purpose. Am I now sounding even a little vicious? But I was clearing the path towards your birth. And so far as Otis’s relapse and decline went, I’ll always believe that something similar was going on. I mean that Otis knew he’d served his purpose too. Even Fraser, if he’d stuck around, wouldn’t have been able to save him.
He understood, even before there was any physical sign, that our house was being prepared for a presence other than his. His mysterious disappearance—who knows?—might even have been some clairvoyant protest at the prospect, which didn’t work, which even redounded against him. He imagined, purring under Alan Fraser’s hands, that all might be as it was again, we’d learnt a lesson. Then, when we went to Venice perhaps and he was interned once more in Carshalton, he realised he was wrong.
Call me unscientific. There’s a feline logic. Your father never subscribed to this theory, he was even rather rattled by its fantasticality. How could Otis know he was being sidelined? In any case, Otis gradually declined. If there was a scientific explanation, Myers couldn’t come up with it or provide an antidote. It wasn’t for want of trying. Unlike your father, I don’t think Myers was such a bad vet—if he lacked the bedside manner. Perhaps I’d developed a general charity towards vets. Otis wasn’t a young cat any more. Since we’d acquired him as a kind of orphan, we’d never known exactly how old he might be. Anyway, cats, it seems, for all their nine lives, sometimes simply fade away.