To Alaric’s delight, it was a boy. He was born without incident in a room on the top floor of the Parn after a labour lasting eight hours, in the course of which Talissa needed only mild pain relief. When the placenta had been delivered, she was examined and cleaned up; there was no need for stitches, the obstetrician told her, and after drinking some herbal tea she fell into a deep sleep while the baby was given a first feed of her colostrum. An hour or so later, Mary went in and pushed back a strand of hair from Talissa’s forehead, choking on her emotion but determined not to wake this fearless young woman.
Mary went and sat in the sunlight in a room down the hall, overlooking Russell Square, holding the baby while a nurse handed her a bottle. Alaric sat beside her, his eyes shining, stunned with pride.
‘Ugly little bugger, isn’t he?’
‘Shh,’ said Mary. ‘He’s perfect.’
Talissa was discharged the next day and took a taxi up to Muswell Hill, but Mary slept in a second night while they ran tests on the baby. Alaric came and brought her some sandwiches he’d made at home with Cheddar and sliced tomato.
‘Have you heard from Talissa?’ he asked.
‘Yes, she rang this afternoon. She said she was feeling great. She had to come back here for another test or two, but she’s already got her ticket home.’
‘I’ll miss her,’ said Alaric. ‘I’ve never met anyone quite like her before.’
‘We’ll stay in touch, I’m sure. And after twelve years she can meet the little guy.’
‘If she wants to. She’ll probably have a family of her own by then.’
‘Do you think?’ said Mary. ‘She doesn’t strike me as the maternal type.’
‘That’s an odd thing to say, in the circumstances.’
‘But you know what I mean.’
‘I do. It’s what made her so right for the job. She told me once it was just like looking after a friend’s house while they’re on holiday.’
‘Talking of houses …’
‘Yes,’ said Alaric. ‘I collected the keys this morning. You do understand, don’t you, that it’s not such a great area.’
‘Yes, yes, we’ve been through this. But the garden. Long enough to kick a ball in.’
‘Yes.’
‘And an attic. Big enough for—’
‘For anything, really.’
Mary laughed. ‘All aboard!’
‘We’ll see. Have you decided on the name?’
‘Yes, I have,’ said Mary. ‘If you’re OK with it, I’d like to call him Seth.’
‘Seth? Was he someone in the Bible?’
‘He was the son of Adam. After Cain murdered Abel in the field. Adam, when he was a hundred and thirty years old, had another son, a sort of replacement for Abel.’
‘Legend! How do you know all this?’
‘Bible study. In one version, Adam also had four boys with Lilith. So Seth was his seventh son.’
‘Who the hell’s Lilith?’
‘Adam’s first wife. A real hot number, according to one of the Hebrew apocrypha.’
‘If you say so.’
Mary laughed. ‘But really it’s just because I like the name.’
‘So do I,’ said Alaric. ‘Seth Pedersen. Sounds reliable. Nice guy. Lend you his lawnmower.’
In Muswell Hill, Talissa packed her bag to return to New York. Kavya Gopal watched her, sitting on the bed.
‘Have you got somewhere to live?’
‘Yeah, I have a place in Boston starting in October. It’s kind of a loft in the Allston district. It’s a student neighbourhood, but it looks pretty cool. Until then I’ll stay with my friend Susan. It’s not long.’
‘What about your boyfriend?’
Talissa laughed. ‘We’ll have to see how that goes. I don’t think you really liked him, did you, Kavya?’ She had finally managed to call her landlady by her first name.
‘He’s very handsome.’
‘That’s not enough, is it? What did you really think?’
‘He only visited twice, so I couldn’t really—’
‘Don’t tell me you’re not going to have an opinion! Not just when I’m leaving.’
Mrs Gopal smiled. ‘Maybe he thinks about himself too much.’
‘I guess most people do. It’s about how you disguise it.’
‘Some things you just can’t … Anyway, my American friend. Are you feeling strong?’
‘Strong? Yes. I never felt better. I slept a lot in that room at the clinic. It was super-comfortable. I got some exercises to do. But they were happy with me. A young mother, you see. Just made for the job.’
‘And how do you feel about the baby? About saying goodbye.’
‘I didn’t say goodbye, Kavya, because I never said hello. I never even really got a look at him.’
‘And that’s OK? Are you sure?’
Talissa stood up. ‘I told you. I never engaged, like, emotionally. It was someone else’s kid. Their project, their life. If ever I wavered for a second, I just told myself that it was none of my business. I was the house-sitter.’
‘And will you ever get to meet him?’
‘When he’s twelve years old, they say. If I want to.’
‘And will you want to?’
Mrs Gopal also stood up, so she was facing Talissa.
‘I can’t … I can’t say.’
The older woman opened her arms for a moment. Talissa moved in gratefully and held on to her.
‘Your heart’s beating so hard,’ said Mrs Gopal.
Talissa stepped back. ‘Bullshit! Let’s do this thing. Let’s pack.’
‘It’s time for some tea. You won’t have proper tea when you get home, will you?’
‘Not like your tea, no. But you’ll bring me some when you come and visit, won’t you?’
Kavya Gopal looked out of the window. ‘I expect so. You’ll have forgotten who I am by then.’
‘Nonsense. How could I forget? When you talked me through my first contractions? To say nothing of my first samosa.’
‘I’ll come to Boston if the taxman hasn’t taken all my money. Who voted for these idiots?’
‘Would you give me a hand with this zip, Kavya? I’ve picked up so much junk. Honestly …’
The new house was further out of town, but closer to Mary’s work and only five minutes more on the bus for Alaric to get to school. It had a pebbledash finish and ugly uPVC windows at the front, but it had plenty of space inside. Alaric fitted up a room for Seth next to his and Mary’s. They’d bought an old wooden cot with flaking paint from a junk shop and he stripped it back to the pine, then rehung the side so it slid up and down more easily. The walls of the room had to be rubbed down before they could be repainted, so the air on the landing was filled with dust. ‘It’s all about the preparation,’ he told Mary when she complained. ‘Any fool can slap on paint.’ Then he bought yards of MDF from the local superstore. For days, he measured, marked and sawed, before he set about making a toy cupboard with soft-close hinges. More clouds of, this time slightly toxic, particles billowed out of the room; but every screw was countersunk so no rough edge should scratch the fingers of the little prince. It was painted red and blue, the colour of the local football team. It was a miracle of rare device, he told himself, as he sat back on his heels; now they needed only trains and cars and wooden building bricks to fill it.
Since she herself had difficulties with dairy products, Mary fed Seth on a soy-based formula that the Parn had recommended. It seemed to go down well with the baby, and his early health checks were normal. He slept through the night in a wicker basket on a stand by her bed and sometimes she put out her hand to feel the regular swell of his breathing. She marvelled at the solid width of his ribcage. After the windows of his room had been left open for two weeks and she was sure there were no paint fumes left, she entrusted him to the cot. When she went in at six the following morning, exhausted from worry, she found him still asleep with the cellular blanket unruffled round his shoulders. She lifted him up under the arms and he opened his unfocused eyes and gazed toothlessly at her, or anyway, in her direction.
There was a call from an NHS health visitor, with a notebook in a red easy-wipe cover, who weighed Seth on a portable scale. The trips to the Parn involved more modern machines and what seemed to Mary an extraordinary amount of blood, albeit taken in single drops from a fingertip. Seth seemed not to mind the pinprick so long as there was a bottle to follow. On the top deck of the bus home, Mary pointed out the sights to him – though he only ever looked at the finger itself, not at the sights to which it tried to guide him.
The weeks melted into months, the rhythm of Alaric’s work easing the passage of time. Mock exams; half-term; set reports due … His colleagues asked after the baby and eventually, when he was four months old, Mary brought him in to the staffroom, still swaddled and with a face swollen red from sleep and crying. The women said how sweet he looked, the men gripped his fingers and asked again how old he was. ‘He looks like his mum,’ said Rose Paxton, the glamorous head of science. ‘Looks like every other kid,’ said Bob Tainsley when they’d gone.
Soon after his first birthday, Seth took his first steps in Eden Park. It started evenly enough, then there were spurts and staggers before he regained his balance and his dignity, like a drunken sailor on shore leave. Mary returned to the kitchen at her sports club, but her varying shifts and Alaric’s long holidays and early finishes meant they needed little outside help.
Mary bought clothes from recommended shops and young mothers’ groups, aware that she was one of the less young ones. Just as all the talk of her ‘eggs’ when she was preparing for the treatment had made her feel like a battery hen, now the mothers’ talk of ‘socialising’ their children made Seth sound like a puppy. But she was happy to take him to playgroups and nurseries, where he met other children with their different hair and skin and clothes and voices and individual ways of being. Mary sat on the edge of the room and watched, feeling like a visitor to a Victorian menagerie as they ran and fell and fought. Seth seemed more self-reliant than most, quite focused on the game he wanted, but reluctant to co-operate.
When he began to talk, his voice was high and pure. The imperative was his mood of choice and Mary became accustomed to doing as instructed. He was a solemn little boy. It was not that he couldn’t laugh when he saw something funny on a screen or in the room, but in his interaction with his parents he seemed to feel no urge to smile.
Alaric casually introduced him to storybooks and films about trains: diesels and steam engines with rosy cheeks, though Seth treated them all with indifference. What excited him was next door’s cat, a stray called Nettle, in whom no other human had ever shown an interest. Seth would point out the cat in the garden and try to stroke her if she came over the fence, though she ran away when he approached. To make up for the persistent rebuffs, Mary bought him a soft toy cat with black and white fur that was subject to his scrutiny and rough handling. It lived on the solid chestnut boat bed that Alaric had bought from a salvage yard and reconditioned when Seth outgrew the cot.
Between the ages of three and four, he began to show affection for his parents, becoming anxious when Mary prepared to leave the house. ‘Don’t go out,’ he ordered when he saw her putting on her work clothes. ‘Stay with Ess!’ – which was the name he gave himself.
He liked wrestling with Alaric and being suspended over the banisters or thrown down with pretend force on the bed. Visitors to the house were treated with suspicion, and he would stare at them, unblinking, till they left.
‘He’s starting to develop a character all right,’ Alaric told his colleagues at work, without saying that the character Seth was developing was rather an odd one. His affection for the child was such that he could barely admit this to himself, though in the course of a check-up at the Parn, Mary did muster the courage to ask if they were sure that Seth was (she had checked the word) ‘neurotypical’. The doctor assured her that in some respects Seth was rather advanced and that any divergence from the norm was unremarkable.
Eventually, there came the question of school. The local primary seemed fine to Alaric, run by a stern matriarchy and with pupils from all over the world. Seth was one of the youngest in the reception class and to Mary’s anxious eye appeared to be among the smallest, too. He was a thickset boy with wide ribs and short legs that neither of his parents wanted to take responsibility for, though Mary told her husband that his own mountain-dwelling ancestors had surely played a part. The hundreds of small children who swarmed between the modern buildings over the playground with its rubberised asphalt represented every variation of humanity and recognised no differences between themselves. Only the parents who came to walk them home worried that their child might be singled out for having some identifying mark that made them a fraction too different.
Seth himself was unconcerned with such things. Football was what mattered. He watched it upstairs on a screen. He recognised the red and blue stripes of Crystal Palace from the colours of his toy cupboard and felt a passionate delight in their movements. He beat the floor with his hand as he urged them on.