And the plain truth is that, meanwhile, something wonderful was happening. Otis dwindled while I got bigger.
By the later stages of my pregnancy—by the spring of 1979—it was clear that Otis’s condition was mortal: it was only a matter of time. But I couldn’t share your father’s heaviness of heart, his grief-in-readiness, yet again, for a cat. Nor his remarkable ability, even if I was the mother-in-readiness, to nurse Otis, tenderly and patiently, through all his last frailties. If anyone could have saved Otis, I think it was your father. I was inside some immune and happy bubble—a bit like you. I was eight months gone when, in early May, Otis died. It will sound heartless of me to say I accepted his death dry-eyed, that I barely mourned, I who’d once been abject at his mere absence, who’d wept just to leave him at a cattery. I couldn’t weep for his death.
I can think of him now, and my eyes go watery. I can picture him now, as if he might be out there, too, his fur getting saturated in this rain. I can recall with an extra thud of my heart that little thud on our bed. But when he died there were no tears. I was full of you. How could I weep? It even seemed like a small forfeit to have paid to fortune. A cat.
It was your dad who wept—and you’ll know he’s capable of that. I’m not so sure that when he shed those tears at his father’s funeral he wasn’t remembering another ceremony at which he did the burying himself. Tears can work like that.
Will it help you at all, tomorrow, to imagine your father weeping for a cat?
He dug a large hole under the lilac tree. Apparently you remember that lilac at Davenport Road, or you do, Nick. It was a true, cat-sized grave. Your father expended great labour and care over it, a once-only job. He made sure it was deep enough so that Otis’s bones would never be disturbed. For a while, as he dug, I thought his mood was simply work-manlike and practical: how to dispose efficiently of a cat. I remembered his snails.
Even your dad could see, if he didn’t accept it as an explanation, that a death was being exchanged for a birth. It was May, the air was warm, the soil was yeasty, our little garden was bursting. On the other hand, it was your dad who, almost exactly a year before, had gone out on those mad patrols in the spring dawns, fearing then that Otis might already be a corpse.
There’s no better way, perhaps, of absorbing and deflecting emotion—perhaps it’s been so arranged—than to dig, to attack the earth with a spade. The lilac was in bloom. It seemed the right, the obvious spot. In my condition, of course, there was no way I was going to assist your dad with his excavating, but I stood there with him after he’d carried out Otis very gently, in some sacking, as if he still might be alive, and put him in his place. He shovelled earth back on top and patted it firmly down. It was only then, with nothing else to do except say, “Goodbye, Otis,” that he leant on his spade and wept.
Your father, who is a scientist by training and has shown himself in recent years to have quite a canny head for business, is an emotional man. When we walked back from our lunch in St. James’s Park, before he took that taxi, I half expected him to clasp me like some soldier leaving for the front. Perhaps he’ll weep tomorrow and get very emotional indeed. Perhaps he’ll go for scientific rigour. Perhaps he’ll try to be businesslike. My father was a perpetual soft touch, soft as they come, at least to me—but he was that iron judge. We all have more than one creature inside us perhaps. And there are some moments in our lives that make us ripe for metamorphosis. Tomorrow you’ll start a new life. And you’ll have to choose between your fathers, if you see what I mean. You’ll have to give judgement on who that man is.
I won’t be the one on trial, but in any case I’m giving you now my testimony in advance. What would your judgement be of me? A bit of a vixen when it comes to it, a touch of my own mother, the seldom-sighted Fiona McKay? I think if your dad knew the truth, had all the facts of my behaviour before him, the twists and turns and mood-swings of that pivotal year before you were born, he might, in the end, just stoically shrug and say that it was all just biology working through me, it was just the old, eternal, ever-crafty maternal instinct, using me as its tool. What a good excuse.
But, anyway, what he’d also say, I know it, is: don’t we have two beautiful kids?
We decided on no marker, no silly, cat-proportioned memorial. Just the lilac itself. In both our heads, perhaps, was the unavoidable funeral music, incongruous as the sound of waves in Herne Hill: “Sit-ting on the dock of the bay…”
We planted lily-of-the-valley and grape hyacinth over the grave. We were already thinking, perhaps, that you should never know. Otis belonged, firmly, to a world before you. But it seems, Nick, that you might have guessed. In any case, it occurs to me that, as a matter of simple, incontestable fact, you were there, both of you were there, even as we buried Otis. You were there, inside me. You couldn’t see a thing, but both of you were undoubtedly present and in attendance at Otis’s funeral.
Both of you. And that was simply the most wonderful, crowning fact of all, that had made me impervious to sorrow and tears, and would make even your father very soon forget his grief for Otis—as they say, if I wasn’t quite ready yet to put it to the test, a mother’s birth-pains are instantly forgotten once birth occurs.
If we’d ever doubted this thing that we’d done—I mean, that I’d done, with your father’s assent and cooperation—if we’d ever questioned, even after the point of no return, the strange bypassing path we’d taken, then didn’t nature, in the end, simply reward and approve and exonerate and congratulate us? Nature—and science. Including that wonderful and still young then science of sonography, which enabled us to see you, even before you were “there,” even before that day by the lilac tree.
If we’d had no doubts at all, there still might have been an awkward follow-up. Suppose all went well and, yes, we acquired a child. Then suppose we wanted another one. What exactly would have been the procedure then? To go back and ask for the same “Mr. S.,” to ask him to oblige once again? But that delicate question would never require an answer, and all doubts, quandaries and compunctions were resolved. One November day we both looked at a strange, blurry, magical screen and saw two little pulsating blobs. Forgive me, but the image stuck: two little floating shrimps. The whole complete and entrancing set all in one go and, as it proved, a boy and a girl. A nuclear family. Twins.
27
GEMINI. On the tenth of June, 1979. And, as we have told you, without any fraudulent invention, at more or less two in the morning. Something we certainly couldn’t specify, but it was what we got. What an extraordinary, world-transforming little word it suddenly seemed to be: two.
And how did your father feel, even months before—when he looked with me at that wobbly screen? Doubly excluded, doubly dismissed? It’s important for you to know, it’s of the utmost relevance for tomorrow. I was there—I had to be—to see you for the first time, but I also looked at your father. And what I saw, for the first time, was that it was real for him. Whatever he may have expected, whatever reactions he may even have prepared, he was smitten from that moment on, as smitten as I was, by you. Quite simply, I saw your father swoon, I saw him tip into love all over again—excuse me for saying so, but I think I could recognise the spectacle. I could almost see the train of thought in his head. Not his? No—not really? Mine, certainly. But none of that was the point. Ours, ours.
A strange, rather chilly contraption (but thank heaven for it) was resting on my belly and I was trying to keep as still as possible, but I wondered if the rush of emotion passing through me, and, for all I know, through you, was making that little screen wobble and judder—“dance” perhaps I mean—so much the more.
On the way back in the car I was genuinely worried your dad’s mind might not be on the road. “Mikey, the lights have turned green.”
Truly, we’d never supposed, in all our suppositions and imaginings, that you might be two—if I can put it like that. Was that thoroughly short-sighted of us? In all our calculations, and how absurd it seems, we’d used only
basic arithmetic, we’d never got beyond the simple addition of one. But for sixteen years now, whatever else they may amount to, we’ve been living in the binary system. This strange equilibrium: a family of two couples. There’s always been that bond and that division between us. I don’t honestly know how it will affect tomorrow. Suppose there were just one of you now to inform. Poor thing. Suppose there were two of you, but with the usual sort of gap. How would that have affected our sixteenth-birthday principle?
You’ll sit side by side on the sofa. You’ll have each other.
And as for your twinness in itself: I bow to it. I don’t pretend to fathom it, even if I am your mother. You’re well aware by now that your parents, this other couple here, consist of two “onlies.” A completely different route into life, a completely different grounding. When we first knew you were two, we had only the usual jumble of uneducated notions. We know a bit more now. But in sixteen years of being the mother of twins and of observing you even more closely perhaps than the average mother, I can’t say I’ve got beyond the conclusion that only twins themselves know what it’s like.
They say you’re a race apart, a separate lore. You’re not like the rest of us, either in your dealings with the world or in your dealings with each other. Do you think that’s all hokum? A special understanding surely gets formed in that double confinement in the womb. It’s not, at least, like the standard experience when there’s only room for one and our arrival on the scene is a big, bawling solo act. Me! Me! Me!
They say you’re less selfish, you’ve learnt to share. They say you’re the opposite: you’re selfishness times two. There’s nothing you won’t do for each other in the eternal struggle with non-twins. Or, then again, behind your interchangeable smiles (but I’ve never thought your smiles were identical), you’re really at war with each other: sibling rivalry without limits.
We’ve seen you slip in and out of almost every version, every interpretation of twinness, play it up, play it down, play against it. Oh you know how to perform. But the truth is, and you both must know it, you were living proof of the harmony principle. You tug against each other now, as if you know that life, for you, will mean the difficult art of separation, but underneath there’s still that sweet solidarity, that glue that you came with. Will tomorrow just bring you together again? Bind you? Thwart you? Delay you?
Nick and Kate; two little balancing sounds. We just liked them. It works the longer way too: Nicholas and Katherine. Apart from that wonderful wobbly image on the screen, I’ve always had the picture in my head of a seesaw. Nick-and-Kate, Nick-and-Kate, a seesaw, your two monosyllables riding up and down. A seesaw can be a grim confrontation: one can give the other a hell of a ride. Or it can be an instrument of swaying delight. And that’s how it’s mostly been, with the occasional rhythmic agitation: swaying delight—in you yourselves, and swaying delight in us, your almost jealous beholders.
What had we done to deserve you? But we knew exactly what we’d done or, in Mike’s case, not done. Was it in some weird way because of that? Or was the trick of it that you were boy and girl? It’s only with boy-twins or girl-twins that the trouble starts? But a boy and girl born together is like a perfect piece of matchmaking. You even used to say (deny it though you will) that you wanted to marry. So in that way too you took after your parents. A seesaw for four—boy-girl, boy-girl—that’s rocked and swayed away for sixteen years.
And that little discrepancy between you only seemed to enhance the balance. Even with twins, there’s priority—one of you had to be born first. And that was you, Kate, by a length. It’s known among the four of us, but it’s stamped upon you anyway: that edge, that lead you’ve always had. But I never saw it as the sign of some race between you—quite the opposite, in fact.
It’s absurd, when I was there, trying my utmost (I assure you) to make the whole astonishing thing happen, that I sometimes picture your birth as if I had nothing to do with it. All your own mutual work. As if you were in some hidey-hole together, waiting your chance, two would-be escapers, and it was you, Kate, who had the courage to poke your head out first and see if all was clear. And the first thing you did was not to make your own quick, brave bolt for it, but to turn back and reach out your hand: “Come on, Nick. It’s okay. Let’s go!”
At two o’clock in the morning, in these small hours, sixteen years ago. I wouldn’t have known if it was raining then, the weather was my last concern.
You helped your brother into the world, Kate. Isn’t that the truth of it? And that’s meant something that I could never have foreseen and that’s occasionally upset the happy motion of the seesaw, if it’s also added, strangely, to its balance. We recognise it between us, I think, don’t we, if it’s never been uttered? That you and I are rival mothers, so far as Nick is concerned. If you both have rival fathers—who will be introduced to you, so to speak, tomorrow—Nick has always had his rival mums.
I think that little pucker was really in his brow at birth, Kate, don’t you? Help me! Wait for me! But since both your faces were such a mass of puckers and creases at that time, I can never be sure. Two little shrimps? Two little livid dumplings! “His father’s frown”—that’s how we say it, that way round. But why shouldn’t we just as well say of a father, why shouldn’t it be just as natural: “Oh, he has his son’s way of knotting his brow?”
Your lungs announced their presence, Nick, seven minutes after your sister. I think your father also gasped.
What will happen tomorrow? But what’s the worst fear of any parent anyway? It starts in the delivery suite. Don’t mix them up with anyone else’s. Having got you, and in such an elaborate way, how frightened we were of losing you. I’m not thinking now, at all, of tomorrow. Of losing you anyway. Your precious little arrived-together selves. Someone should have told us about this perfectly normal parental terror. But didn’t having it prove that we were normal parents?
You can’t have the one thing (or indeed the two) without the other, the possession without the dread: it’s the fundamental contract. Don’t think for one moment that our peculiar contract in any way diminished that. And don’t doubt when you learn what you’ll learn tomorrow that there’s ever been any difference in that respect between the two of us. We’re perfect twins, that way, too. Both of us, either of us would lay down our lives in an instant if it meant not losing either or both of you.
But you know this. You’ve even borne witness to it—or almost. You know, of course, what I’m coming to. What shocked me and paralysed me, that terrible day in Cornwall—what added, I mean, to my multiple shock, panic, terror, utter distraction—was your father’s own terrifying insistence. He screamed it at me, he ordered me: “No! Me! Wait there!” As if, amid everything else, he saw this as his moment of opportunity.
He was the stronger, of course, but I was the better swimmer. He knew this: he’d seen me at Craiginish, he’d seen me in Brighton. He’d seen me, for goodness’ sake, right there in Cornwall. But he dived in almost at the same time as he let out that yell to me. How was he to know that that current that was pulling you out and away from the rocks wouldn’t be as defeating for an adult as for your own nine-year-old frames?
It swept him out to you quickly enough at least. To both of you. I’d already, for the second time in my life, taken overpowering and indelible note of your both-ness. That is, that you were being drawn away from dry land by some force that neither of you could resist and you, Nick, even less than your sister, but you weren’t going to be separated from each other. Your two bobbing heads, like linked, swirling buoys—another image of you that’s with me for ever.
Mike moved rapidly towards you, almost too rapidly. I could only see the back of his own bobbing head. I had the unthinkable thought that in the next few gliding moments you would all be lost, all pulled away from me, all that mattered to me, and I would have to watch. I saw myself standing alone on bare rock, wishing to turn to rock myself.
Everything in my memory of that day is like some evil blend of
the benign and the horrific. It was a beautiful day, it was hot, it was more like a day in the Mediterranean than in Cornwall. It was the third summer we’d spent by that little safe, sandy cove and we thought we could trust you now if you scampered off a bit further. You’d learnt to swim two years before. You were good and confident at it, like me. The sea was blue and wallowy and lazy, the tide was coming in. On the other side of the headland, when we got there, there was a touch of breeze and a bit of swell and slap to the waves, but no one would have called that sea dangerous.
There were other happy people on the beach. The two of us had been swimming not so long before and we were lying, drying, becoming sweetly drowsy. It sends a terror through me, even now, that we might have just fallen asleep. But we both had the sudden simultaneous alarm: where are they? It makes me quiver still—I can’t explain our decision—that we might have gone in the other direction first.
Even as I stood there, looking at the three of you, about to leave me, I had the mocking, the split-second dream of a thought: that this would be a nice spot to be in, just to stand here or to sit, on this warm, basking shelf of rock, with these beautiful dark-blue waves now and then sending up pleasing spouts of spray, with the cliffs and the blue sky and the whole hazy, summery coastline curving away. I think I even saw myself flipped safely, inviolately back: a girl again, aged nine myself, on the beach at Craiginish, where none of this could possibly be happening.