Delmore Redding, the psychologist at the Parn Institute, was a solemn young man with round glasses, a knotted tie and a button-down shirt, which he wore beneath a navy blue slipover as if in tribute to a Harvard professor of the Kennedy era. His accent had a pleasing hint of North Carolina. His office was on the top floor in Russell Square, where the autumn sun was bending through the almost leafless branches of a sycamore and painting liquid patterns on the bare wall. As she sat down, Talissa tried not to think of her interviewer as an antagonist, someone sent to pry the scabs off wounds she didn’t even know she had. She uncrossed her arms and smiled briefly at him.
‘Tell me a little about your family,’ said Redding. ‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’
‘No. Just me. I guess I was a handful.’
‘And you grew up in New York?’
‘Yes. In the Bronx.’
‘Do you still live there?’
‘No, I live in West Harlem. Made it to Manhattan. Just.’
‘Did you get on well with your parents?’
‘Yes. We were pretty close.’
He looked at her as if expecting her to say more. Talissa looked back.
‘And did you have friends at school?’ he said eventually.
‘Yeah, I guess so. I was a little … Maybe a little geeky, you know? I wasn’t the most popular girl, a cheerleader type. But, yes, I had friends.’
‘And when you were older, did you have boyfriends? Did you get asked out?’
‘Sure thing. But it was all very superficial, you know? They told me I was cute or something, but when we got to really talking …’
‘Did you scare them off?’
‘I wouldn’t say scared, no. But they just wanted to fool around and maybe I didn’t.’
Delmore Redding made a note on his pad. ‘And have you had many sexual partners?’
‘I wouldn’t want to say.’ Did five count as ‘many’?
‘And your sexual relations, they’ve been fulfilling?’
Talissa looked down at the floor and noticed Redding’s tasselled shoes and charcoal woollen socks. ‘I like guys, if that’s what you mean. I feel … you know, desire for them.’
‘And have you had long-term relationships?’
‘Hell, no! I’m only twenty-six.’
‘But you’ve had a steady boyfriend.’
‘I’ve had two, to be precise. But sex and love and friendship and respect … Wow. You know. Call me in twenty-five years and I’ll let you know how I got on.’
They spent ten minutes paddling in some shallow water about ‘intimacy’ before Redding said: ‘Now. On the question of surrogacy itself. Was it something you’d been considering for a long time?’
‘It never crossed my mind. In vitro, sperm donors … There’s a whole vocabulary out there most people never use. Never think about.’
Talissa was starting to resent these questions. It was she who had made the offer of lending her healthy body to a stranger: the cross-examination ought to have been the other way round. But she had to answer.
‘I do feel protective of other people sometimes,’ she said. ‘I’ll see a child on the subway or in a store and I have an urge to shield it from all the bad things I know may lie ahead. They’re so vulnerable. Is that a maternal instinct? I feel pity sometimes, too. For animals, mostly. I’m sorry if that sounds weird. I feel a desire to look after them. And sometimes I feel that same surge of pity for people I just see on the street. But it’s not an admirable feeling. I’m not trying to make out I’m a good person.’
Redding nodded. ‘And what would you say is your motivation in wanting to carry this child for another woman? Is it pity for her?’
‘No. I haven’t met her. A feeling of pity would be … Out of place. I’m not expecting to perform some kind of miracle. I’m not offering myself because I think it would be a big deal, but because it wouldn’t be. And the money would enable me to carry on with my work. That’s an important part of it for me. I want to be straight with you about that.’
Also, she didn’t say, because I’ve messed up with my boyfriend and I need time to—
‘And what is your work? It says you’re an academic. What’s your subject?’
Talissa felt a sharp resistance. She didn’t want anyone to know that she had been turned down for the University of London course financed by the Parn. ‘I guess you could say I’m a historian. An ancient historian.’
Redding’s pen moved across his pad and Talissa sat back, waiting for him to finish.
‘Do you have any questions for me?’ Redding said.
‘Yes,’ said Talissa. ‘Do I get to meet the parents? Or is it better not to?’
‘We’ve found there’s a better result when people become friends. So we do encourage you to get to know them.’
‘OK. Well, that would seem to be … polite.’
Redding looked up from his pad. ‘You don’t talk like someone of twenty-six.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You sound older.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Can we just go back to your childhood.’
‘Ah! Childhood.’
‘Would you like to have had a brother or sister?’
‘God, yes. I would love to have had a kid sister. Or brother. I think there was a whole part of me that never got used.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘A kind of … reservoir of protective love that you can’t give upwards. To people older than you. You can only give downwards, to someone younger.’
‘And is that still frustrated in you? That unused love?’
Talissa thought for a moment, winding the end of a strand of hair around her finger. ‘Yes. I think so. I don’t think it’s, like, rotting inside me. It’s not ticking like a bomb. But it is still there.’
‘Do you know why your parents had no more children? Was it a financial thing?’
There was another pause. Talissa breathed out. ‘I guess it was because my father died.’
‘I see. And how old were you?’
‘I was eight years old.’
Delmore Redding said nothing. Talissa knew that that was what shrinks did. He also managed to keep his face impassive. She looked at the box of tissues on the table between them. Next to it was a saucer of chocolates wrapped in gold foil. Perhaps if she was a very good girl he would let her have one.
‘He’d been sick for a time. I knew nothing about it. I came back from school one day and my mother was crying in the kitchen. There was someone else there. A stranger. I think she was a social worker from the hospital. My mother couldn’t speak. So this woman had to tell me.’
Talissa held the arm of the chair. She had probably said enough.
‘And you were eight?’
‘Yes,’ she said, leaning forward.
‘It must have been hard for you.’
‘Well … The thing was … I never got to say goodbye.’
There was nothing else to discuss. Talissa felt she had given Redding all he needed to know. It was fine that the Parn wanted to know about her emotional life, but really it was more a question of her womb, wasn’t it? Of vaginal pH and the other things that Dr Worthington’s holiday photos might confirm.
‘What are your plans for the time after the baby’s born?’
‘It depends on the money. But my hope would be that I’d go back to New York and pick up my research work.’
‘I see. They wouldn’t mind that you’d taken some time out?’
‘Not at all. It’s a question of finding a programme where I can be useful. A placement. And the money, of course. I guess that at that stage putting some distance between me and the parents – and the kid … That would be helpful.’
Redding looked at his watch. ‘Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Miss Adam. You can always message if you have any questions.’
Talissa decided to walk a little through the strange, enormous city. She passed the beetroot-coloured arches of Russell Square station’s tiled façade and carried on down the narrow street. On one side were ancient brick houses, tight in their grimy rows, hundreds of years old; on the other side rose tiered modern apartments over a windy plaza of movie theatres and glass-fronted food outlets.
Her idea of this continent was hazy, she had to admit. If someone said the word ‘Europe’ she thought both of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and of airy art galleries; of a large number of unnecessary languages and ancient monuments. It was a blur of bombs and antiquity, the pillars of the Parthenon blitzed by the Luftwaffe.
In Bloomsbury, the digging works and Road Ahead Closed signs made the streets feel deserted; dry leaves scraped the paving slabs and eddies of dust collapsed between the black railings. Life stirred again in a narrow market. With its Mexican tapas and Japanese sushi bars, this street hardly seemed to be in London at all. And all these little Homo sapiens, Talissa thought: the rapid diaspora on whom the intervening years had laid small changes of appearance, but none significant enough to stop their reunion in a few yards of city ground.
Eventually she came to a station, Angel, that she knew was on the black line going north. The reader on the turnstile accepted her dollar-loaded wrist chip and she went down into the tunnels, thinking about the baby-to-be.
Another being helped into the light wouldn’t alter the flux and reflux of the ravening species, but its existence would bring joy to its parents and employment to her. What more, really, was there? Love and joy. Work. Joy from love.