Maggie sucked in her breath, squeezed shut her eyes and grimaced. Her friend Jeannie ripped the fabric away from her skin and threw the tufted strip into a small trash can on the floor. Maggie bit down on a yell. Jeannie smoothed another strip of fabric down against the inside of Maggie’s buttock and once again Maggie drew in her breath.
“Just pull there, will you, Mags?” said Jeannie, indicating a haunch of thigh. Maggie gripped it and held it taut while Jeannie ripped some more hairs from a place that Maggie tried not to spend too much time thinking about. She let a small howl issue from between her clenched lips and said: “Are we nearly done?”
Jeannie scrutinized Maggie’s undercarriage through heavily mascaraed eyes and ran her fingertips over her bikini line. “Yes,” she replied vaguely, “nearly done. Another few minutes, I reckon.”
Jeannie had been waxing Maggie for about twenty-five years. Neither could really remember if they’d been friends before Jeannie had first pulled pubic hairs out of her thighs or if they’d become friends as a result of it, but they’d certainly been acquainted. Maggie was not the sort of person who would let just anyone see her from that angle.
Maggie came to Jeannie’s house once every month. It was daft really as nobody ever got to see her naked these days and she didn’t even use the swimming pool in town anymore, since she’d been spending all her free time at the hospice. For a while she’d hoped that maybe Daniel might one day countenance her naked form, but that was not now going to happen. But still, it was important, Maggie felt, to be properly groomed, everywhere, at all times. She felt clean when she was waxed, she felt hygienic.
Jeannie finally pronounced herself finished and smoothed oil over Maggie’s thighs. “How’s your friend?” she asked, snapping off her rubber gloves and letting them fall into the trash can.
Maggie smiled sadly. Her friend. That’s all he’d ever be now. She felt engulfed by grief every time she thought of the lovely journey that she and Daniel would never get to share. “Daniel?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, well.” Maggie rolled herself from Jeannie’s treatment table and retrieved her tights. “Not so good. You know. It’s a very strange process, I must say. Very strange to be so close to someone who’s basically . . .”
“Dying?”
“Well, yes.” Maggie didn’t appreciate that rather brutal use of the word. She was sure there was a better way of putting it. “But it’s odd. Some days he just seems like there’s nothing wrong with him at all. Other days I expect to walk into his room and see an empty bed, you know, all neatly made up with tight corners and fresh pillows. All ready for the next poor soul.” She shuddered, delicately. “I feel so sad for him. It’s all so protracted and unpredictable. In a way it would be better . . .”
“To get knocked down by a bus?”
“Well, no!” Maggie laughed nervously. “No! I mean, that would be terribly painful, after all. And you might not . . . pass away immediately. You might end up in a wheelchair. Or brain-damaged. No! But, maybe, you know, the Swiss approach. A little injection. All over.”
“Well”—Jeannie wiped her hands on a paper towel and pulled off her white overall—“that’s kind of what they’re doing in there, isn’t it? Palliative care? Lots and lots of little injections, killing you off a tiny bit at a time?”
“No!” protested Maggie. “No! They’re just helping him with the pain!”
“Yes, but they’re not trying to keep him alive, are they? They’re not trying to help him get better?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean they’re killing him. You know, he danced with me the other day. He did. He took me for a walk in the gardens and he asked me to dance. I mean, if he really was being ‘put out of his misery’ by the hospice, surely he wouldn’t have been able to do that? Surely it would just be a slow decline rather than all this jumping about? And . . .” She paused. She’d been living with the strange knowledge of Daniel’s revelation for almost a week now. She hadn’t spoken to anyone about it. Mainly because she didn’t really talk to anyone much these days, her life being as consumed by Daniel as it currently was. She looked at her old friend; possibly, apart from her children, her mother and Daniel, the closest person to her in her life, and she felt the words bubble up from within her.
“He told me something amazing, Jeannie,” she said, pulling up her black sheer tights. “But if I tell you, you have to promise that you won’t tell another soul.”
Jeannie raised her eyebrows at her. “Who the hell do I know who would have any interest in your friend Daniel when none of us have even met him?”
Maggie bridled. “Well, you just never know. So promise me.”
“I promise you.” Jeannie sighed and smiled at her old friend.
“He was a sperm donor, back in the eighties and nineties.”
Jeannie’s overplucked eyebrows leaped toward her hairline. “Wow,” she said.
“And he has four children. Two boys and two girls. All in their late teens or twenties.”
“Oh, my goodness.” Jeannie rearranged a cushion behind her back and stared at Maggie agog.
“I know. And he’s never met any of them. Knows nothing about them apart from their birthdays and genders. And now that he’s so, well, you know, close to the end, he says he wants to see them. Or at least find out about them. And obviously, in his current situation, there’s not much he can really do about it.”
“So you want to get involved?”
“Well, yes, I suppose I do. Though I haven’t got a clue where I’d start. I mean, where would one start? It’ll be like finding a needle in a haystack. Or actually four needles.”
“Did he tell you which clinic he donated to?”
“No,” said Maggie. “No. I didn’t really ask him anything about it after he told me. I didn’t want to push it too far. Not in his condition.”
“Well, if you’re serious about doing this for him, you’ll need something to go on.”
“Yes, yes. I know. Of course, you’re right.”
“When are you next seeing him?”
“Later. Six-ish.”
“And you’re serious about doing this for him?”
“Totally.”
“Well, then, you can’t afford to hang around. Take in a notepad and a pen and ask him everything. If the cancer is spreading to his brain, tonight could be your last chance.”
Maggie shuddered lightly. But then she nodded. “I know,” she said, feeling a deep well of sorrow building inside her at the thought of Daniel’s poor calcifying brain. “I will. Tonight. I’ll talk to him. Tonight.”
∗ ∗ ∗
They were wheeling around the drinks trolley when Maggie arrived at the hospice just after six. “Wine? Beer? Sherry?” asked a cheery woman wearing a pink rose in her hair. There was a matching rose in a vase on the trolley and some chocolate fairy cakes sprinkled with silver balls, a gift from a well-wisher. Cakes often appeared in the corridors around here. Cakes and books and cases of wine. It was remarkable to Maggie that there were so many generous-spirited people in the world, quietly sprinkling silver balls on freshly baked fairy cakes and parceling them up in Tupperware boxes, finding a space in their days to drop them off, not hanging around to hear whether or not they were considered delicious but coming back the next week to collect the Tupperware boxes, all for the sake of simple human kindness.
Maggie had always thought of herself as a good person. She smiled at everyone she met and gave to charity collectors and always told people that they looked nice. She recycled and held babies for people and gave generously when friends asked her to sponsor them to do a charity run or hike. She’d even done a fun run herself a few years earlier. Just a mile. In a pink tracksuit. For breast cancer. But still. She liked to think of herself as human sunshine, a person to brighten up your day, a distributor of good karma. But she wondered about this assessment of herself more and more these days, confronted by the rich soup of endless giving and contributing and doing and caring sloshing around at this hospice every day.
“Can I get you a glass of wine, Mr. Blanchard?” the lady with the rose in her hair asked gently as she edged her way into the room.
Daniel smiled. “Yes,” he declared happily. “Yes. I think today I would love to drink a glass of wine. What do you have?”
“Red or white,” said the lady, whose badge, Maggie observed, named her as April.
Daniel smiled again, a special smile, Maggie had noticed, that he used when an English person amused him in some indefinable way. He used it on her a lot. She’d given up asking him what he was smiling about. He could never explain.
“In which case,” he continued, “I will have a lovely glass of your finest white. Thank you.”
April poured the wine into a small rounded glass, the type they used to serve wine in in pubs in the old days. The glass was scratched and too old to keep its shine, and the wine had a look of not being far off room temperature. But still, thought Maggie, a glass of wine is a glass of wine when you’re trapped in bed in a hospice. If it were her in that bed with cancer running round all over her insides, she’d do nothing but drink wine all day, she mused, warm or cheap or otherwise. There’d be no reason not to.
April poured Maggie a small glass of red wine and then left them each with a fairy cake on a paper napkin, which both she and Daniel already knew they would not eat, and then they were alone again.
Despite his enthusiasm for the concept of wine, Daniel did not look like a man who wanted a drink and, indeed, barely touched it. His face had grown slack new contours overnight and his hair was looking thinner, wirier; less like hair and more like stuffing. His entire form looked flat, like a cartoon character gone under a cement roller. It was as though his body were taking on the textures and the shapes and the lines of his bed, as though he and his bed were somehow growing together, like layers of compost. He put the wineglass down on his tray and Maggie had to leap to her feet to steady it as it wobbled perilously in his unsteady grasp.
“Thank you, Maggie. My arms feel like twigs. They do. I cannot believe that once I used to carry heavy books in these arms. I built a garden wall with these arms. I carried my mother in these arms, down two flights of stairs. And now . . .” He let his words fade away.
Maggie wanted to leap upon these facts about the heavy books and the garden wall and the carried mother. When? she wanted to ask. Why? What books? What wall? But she could sense Daniel’s weakness and knew that she should only really make him think about things that were vital, and right now the precise history surrounding the building of a garden wall was far from vital.
“Listen,” she began, first tucking her hair behind her ear and then pulling from her handbag a small notepad and pen, “what you were saying the other day, remember, in the garden? About being a sperm donor? About the children?” She stared at him anxiously, willing him to remember. A light flickered inside his eyes and she breathed a sigh of relief.
“Yes,” he replied. “Of course I remember. You do not easily forget the first time you tell another human being your deepest, oldest secret.”
She smiled, grateful for his remembering and for the fact of his confidence in her. “Good,” she said, taking his hand in hers, “I’m glad. But listen . . . and you are absolutely allowed to say no to this . . . I was wondering . . .”
“Yes,” he interrupted. “Yes. I want you to do it.”
“Do what?” Maggie held her hand to her throat in surprise.
“Find them. If you can. I want you to find them. I want to know that they are happy and bright and beautiful and glad that I allowed them to be. You know that they are not angry. Or even that they are.”
“Really?” said Maggie, smoothing down the open pages of her notepad. “Oh, gosh, that’s so brilliant. I’ve been meaning to ask you for days and been too worried in case you didn’t want to talk about it again. I mean, the last thing I’d want to do is upset you.”
“Oh, Maggie.” Daniel smiled and squeezed her hand. “How could you ever upset me? I shouldn’t imagine you’ve ever upset anyone in your life!”
Maggie smiled, knowing somewhere deep down inside that this was probably true and something of a point of honor.
“Yes,” he continued, “I give you permission. I think I have time. But knowing that this could be possible . . . well, I will make myself the time. I read an article last year. There is now a website for children of donor fathers. I remembered this suddenly in the middle of a dream a few days ago. It is possible, I suppose, that my children may be on this website, that they may even have met each other. They may all be somewhere now, having a cup of tea or, perhaps, a very tiny glass of warm wine”—he laughed out loud—“wondering who exactly this so-called father of theirs is. It is worth having a look, I suppose. But all these years I thought it didn’t matter and now I am almost gone and, well, my timing is terrible. I can see that. Truly, truly terrible. But even if you only find one. Even if you find out just that one of my children is alive. Maybe the color of their hair. Or their name. Or the title of their job. Just one fact, however small. It would be the greatest gift to take with me to my ending. It would be the greatest thing anyone has ever done for me.”
He smiled down at his bedsheets, at their entwined hands. His eyes were wet again. They rubbed their fingers together like good luck charms and Maggie blinked away her own tears. She didn’t ask him how he would feel if she found no one. Neither did she ask him how he would feel if she found someone when he’d already drifted too far out into the ocean of his own demise even to be aware of it. Nor how he would feel if she found someone who was sad or damaged or full of hate and anger. She just smiled and stroked his hand and said, “Leave it with me, Daniel, I’ll do everything I can.”
∗ ∗ ∗
Daniel’s flat was formed from the top two floors of a large detached house just on the outskirts of the town center. The house sat behind a graveled carriage driveway and was at the uglier end of Edwardian architecture. But still it retained several pleasing features such as some ornate stained glass in the front door, leaded windows and a highly polished brass plate in which were embedded six glass buttons, each coupled to a doorbell. The button for Daniel’s flat read: M. D. Blanchard. Maggie’s natural instinct was to press the button but inside her handbag was a set of keys. Daniel had handed them to her in the hospice the night before with precise instructions about a further key to be found hanging from a nail knocked into the wall behind a desk, and a small drawer into which this key would fit, and a green folder entitled “WFC,” inside which Maggie would find everything she needed to contact the fertility clinic and identify him sufficiently to access the Donor Sibling Registry. Maggie had been to Daniel’s flat before. Once to have some champagne on his terrace on a particularly beautiful early September evening (“This could be our last chance to sit out for a very long time, we mustn’t miss it”) and once to help him pack for his stay at the hospice. She’d cleared out his fridge and opened his drawers and unplugged his television, but all under his supervision. She felt like an intruder now, here on her own.
The air inside his flat was still and dense. His cleaner had been in a couple of times during the past month so the place was not exactly as it had been left, but still it felt like an intrusion to be here, to disturb the dust motes and the Hoover tracks in the carpet, to mark the place in any way. It was unlikely now that Daniel would ever return to this place, but if he ever did, if there was a God and he did cast down a miracle (stranger things happened every day), then it would be nice for him to find the place untouched, waiting, like an old dog.
Daniel’s flat was not the flat of a middle-aged Frenchman, more the flat of an elderly Englishman. His walls were hung with reproduction oil paintings and his furniture was heavy and brown. His curtains were cream jacquard and his sofa was a Chesterfield. His bookshelves were lined with British classics and his kitchen smelled like stale Mazola and Ritz crackers. A dried-out blue dishcloth hung stiffly from the swan’s neck tap. It was a nice flat. Maggie had pictured herself maybe living here one day, a long time earlier, when Daniel had simply been a serious man with a bad back. All the lamps had been on then, the air had been thick with late summer and birdsong, and she’d been pleasantly elevated by champagne and the proximity of the most handsome man in Bury St. Edmunds. Anything had seemed possible back then.
She rested her handbag on a small table and unfurled her long silky scarf. She looked around her, trying to locate a “small walnut desk.” She found it lurking behind a large overstuffed armchair. It was home to a collection of glass paperweights containing swirls of chartreuse and cranberry, and some small framed black-and-white photographs of people (his parents, she assumed) getting married a very long time ago. She crouched down and felt the wall behind the desk from inside the kneehole, until her fingers located the key, hanging from a piece of green twine. She then found the small drawer hidden away inside another drawer behind a secret panel, and there it was, as promised, a light green folder, musty and faded, marked with the letters WFC.
She took the folder to the armchair and settled herself against the heavy upholstery. She held the folder for a while on her lap, feeling the full enormity of her task, the totality of Daniel’s trust in her. There were lives contained inside this folder. People. Stories. And, more importantly, there were secrets. Maggie didn’t care for secrets. Or lies. She didn’t have the right sort of mind for juggling all the requisite bits and pieces, the things you shouldn’t say, the people you shouldn’t mention certain things to, the words that had “never been spoken,” the events that had “never taken place.” It was all too confusing and nerve-racking. A life without secrets and lies was a simple path to walk. Inside this folder were lives with so many layers of complexity that it made Maggie dizzy just to contemplate them.
Daniel did not have a computer. “Who am I going to send an e-mail to?” he’d protested. “What is there on the Internet that I cannot find on my bookshelves? What? ”
“But what about booking holidays?” Maggie had countered.
“Holidays! Ah, yes, holidays,” he’d replied. “I do not go on holidays. I have the sea an hour from my door and I live in one of the most beautiful towns in this country. I take my holidays on my terrace.” He’d smiled, and Maggie had smiled and thought that she’d never met anyone as simultaneously fascinating and utterly prosaic as Daniel in all her life.
She would need to take the papers home, back to her house, use her own computer. Her work here was done. But still, it struck her that maybe there was more she could do. She may never come back to this flat. She had no legal right to enter it. She was not included on any of Daniel’s official paperwork. It was likely that she would be the one to deal with his affairs when he was gone, but it was not definite, and supposing, she pondered, supposing she traced a child or two and supposing that child or two wanted to make contact with Daniel and supposing this all happened too late, that Daniel was comatose or, worse, that he was gone. What would she be able to tell that person about the man they’d wanted to meet?
She could recount her own memories of him, retell her own few meager anecdotes. But that would not be enough. She had only known this man for a year, and for most of that time he had been dying. She knew so little about him. He was so opaque and impenetrable. She knew that he had an elderly mother, a bachelor brother, that he’d once been a doctor, that he’d retired due to ill health. (He hadn’t elaborated but she’d suspected that the illness had been more mental than physical. People generally liked to talk about their physical ailments. Mental illness, on the other hand . . . ) She knew that he had a boat by the sea at Aldeburgh, a dinghy, called Clarissa. (She did not know why it was called Clarissa and she had never had the opportunity to see the boat as Daniel had stopped taking it out when his back started to trouble him, at exactly the same time that he had come into Maggie’s life. She felt it again, that stab of hurt that she really had missed the best of Daniel by such a small margin.)
She knew that he liked to read and he liked to drink and he liked to eat, that most of the restaurateurs of Bury and the surrounding hamlets knew him by name and shook his hand warmly when he walked into their establishments. She did not know how he could afford to eat out so regularly or how he had afforded to furnish his generously proportioned home so finely or how he paid for the champagne and the wine and the smart clothes and the private physiotherapy. She knew nothing about this man that would really be of any help to a child asking questions and she would hate to pull someone out of their blanket of ignorance and then be unable to give them anything more than a vague sense of a person that they would never get to meet.
So she went into Daniel’s kitchen and she found a stash of crumpled shopping bags and she then went about filling the bags with what she could only describe as mementos. It seemed a terrible thing to be doing, stripping the essence of the man away from his home, without his permission, without his knowledge, and it was ordinarily not at all the sort of thing that Maggie would ever do. But this situation was far from ordinary. Daniel had not asked her to do an ordinary thing. The normal rules did not apply.
She put into a bag the two small framed photos of the long-ago married couple. (“And this,” she imagined herself telling a dumbstruck twenty-year-old, “is a photo of your father’s parents. Your grandparents, I suppose.”) She put in a bottle of his aftershave (something in a ribbed glass bottle from a shop called Trumper’s, that smelled like cucumbers and cut grass). She found some old Boots photo packets stuffed with pictures of Daniel in various guises: on his boat, sitting on a bench with a lady friend, at the Henley Royal Regatta in a straw boater, holding someone’s King Charles spaniel. She only flicked through them cursorily, having no desire to study them in depth without their owner’s permission. She took a photo album filled with tiny black-and-white photos of long-dead relatives in flapper dresses and long-nosed cars. She took notebooks filed along a shelf, although she did not open them to see what they might contain, feeling that that too went some good way beyond the pale. She took a framed map from the wall, a watercolor representation of the area around Dieppe from where he came, and she took a small blue address book from the telephone table. And then she straightened up the cushion on the armchair to remove the imprint that her behind had left in it, took one last look around the place, and quietly, respectfully, pulled the door closed behind her and headed for home.