Maggie asked her friend Jeannie over for dinner the following night. She invited her for three reasons: firstly because she wanted a pedicure, secondly because her eighteen-month-old granddaughter Matilda was staying the night and, as much as Maggie might have given birth to and raised two children all by herself, she still felt a little untethered when left alone with a child she had not directly brought into being. But thirdly, and mainly, because she wanted her help with signing Daniel up to the donor website. She’d had a quick look at it last night when she’d gotten back from his flat, and quickly switched it off again. It had looked horribly convoluted and she hadn’t known where to start in terms of correlating the information in Daniel’s folder with the information needed on the form.
It was 7:30 and Jeannie was upstairs with Matilda, having offered to read her her bedtime story while Maggie got on with dinner. Maggie could hear Matilda overhead, scampering up and down the landing, screaming with high-pitched excitement, and realized that Jeannie had fallen into the oldest trap in the book: attempting to endear herself to a small child by making it laugh, prompting an endless cycle that resulted, on the whole, in hysteria and ended shortly thereafter in tears. Maggie raised her eyebrows and smiled. It was nice to hear life in her house. She did enjoy living alone, but it was at moments like these that she remembered what it had felt like when her house was full of other people’s lives.
On the stove was a pot of coq au vin, though Maggie realized it was a little old-fashioned to call it that these days; chicken stew would probably be more de rigueur. On the kitchen counter she tipped some green leaves into a smart white bowl (she’d gotten rid of all the patterned stuff when her husband moved out, and replaced it with this oversized white stuff, like they served on in trendy pubs). She opened a bottle of French dressing and then she sliced a fat French loaf (known as a rustique according to the accompanying signage in Waitrose) into ovals. She unfurled a John Lewis brightly spotted tablecloth onto the kitchen table and laid it with more white plates and matching spotted paper napkins.
She had already opened a bottle of wine. It was one that Daniel had recommended to her many months ago, French, of course, and she’d developed a fondness for it that was less to do with the wine itself and more to do with the memory of a charmed moonlit night in a bistro in Aldeburgh, involving fresh razor clams and samphire, flickering red candles, and a slow and balmy walk back to the parking lot through cobbled streets accompanied by the sounds of seagulls circling overhead in the almost darkness.
She’d spent three hours at the hospice today. Daniel had been sweetly spacey, his face relaxed into a kind of compacted smile for most of her visit. Maggie liked to think it might partially have been inspired by her presence, by the soothing charm of her measured conversation, but knew in reality it was just the drugs. He hadn’t wanted to talk about anything serious and she’d been unsure about bringing up the subject of the Donor Sibling Registry in his current state. The nurses were happy with his condition. He had stabilized, they said. Which brought to mind an image of a speeding car applying its brakes just a few feet from a cliff face and then sitting there with an idling engine, the driver tap-tap-tapping the steering wheel before putting his foot to the accelerator again and hurtling off the edge. This was the best she could hope for, an idling engine. She just hoped that Daniel’s engine would remain idling long enough for her to make contact with at least one of his lost children.
Jeannie finally came downstairs half an hour later. She looked flushed and her wavy hair was disheveled. She grabbed her wineglass from the kitchen counter and filled it to the top. “And there was me, thinking I was ready to be a grandmother.” She laughed.
Maggie laughed too. “Exhausting, isn’t it? Especially at our age. I don’t know how these old mothers do it, you know, these ones popping out babies in their forties. It’s a young woman’s game, in my opinion.”
“A very young woman’s game,” agreed Jeannie. “Cheers.” She held her glass out toward Maggie’s. “To being old and child-free.”
“Oh, yes, indeed.” Maggie smiled and clinked her glass against Jeannie’s. “And cheers to you too. Thanks for coming over. And thank you for my lovely toenails.”
“Always a pleasure doing your trotters, Mrs. Smith. They’re the nicest ones I know.”
The women sat down then and enjoyed a pleasant meal of stew and bread, the sounds of Matilda’s deep-asleep breathing on the baby monitor accompanying their gentle conversation. They talked about Daniel and they talked about their children and they talked about the Italian holiday that Jeannie was taking that summer with her new boyfriend. After dinner they took their half-full wineglasses through to Maggie’s living room and they settled themselves in front of her laptop. (Her son had picked it out for her and set it up last Christmas. It was a Mac, in deep rose pink. Maggie was very fond of it.)
On the table in front of them was Daniel’s paperwork, arranged into piles according to relevance. Maggie had pulled out all the really personal stuff, the photos and such, and put it away. Not for Jeannie’s eyes. Only for the eyes of Daniel’s children. And then together the two friends filled out a form that was intended to be filled out by the man slowly fading away in a big white bed, in a small modern building, half a mile away from where they sat.
Jeannie left at eleven o’clock and Maggie walked around her small, neat house, turning off the lights, tidying her desk, drawing the curtains across the living-room windows. She always found this time of night unsettling. The trees outside grew manes and limbs in the dark night breezes, and people passing by her window on their way home looked panicky and rushed. Maggie’s heart always beat a little faster as she pulled her curtains together, some primal echo of the drawing up of footbridges, the battening down of hatches, the padlocking of gates. Caves had no windows. Wombs had no windows. Windows were inherently just holes in a house.
She took the stairs quietly and tiptoed into the spare room where her granddaughter slumbered. She was the wrong way round in her portable crib. Either Jeannie had put her in the wrong way or she had managed to turn herself the full one hundred and eighty degrees. She was dressed in a red sleeper: Maggie’s daughter, Libby, was not fond of pink; had, in fact, quite strong political objections to the color pink and the brainwashing of little girls into worshipping at the altar of pink. Maggie didn’t really understand why it riled her so much. It was only a color.
Matilda had a thick mop of auburn waves, exactly the same color as Libby’s, and her face was a square brick of plumped, creamy flesh implanted with two enormous green eyes, just like her father’s, and a tiny little whorl of a pink mouth which apparently had something to do with her great-grandmother on her father’s side. There she lay, her fists curled inward toward her ears, a living, breathing amalgamation of a hundred thousand different people, all of whom had at some point in their lives had a night of passion with somebody else and made another one, outward and onward in ever-increasing circles, an unstoppable force of humanity extrapolating itself across millennia. Until here, in a small cottage in a Bury St. Edmunds backwater, it was all distilled down into one perfect, creamy pearl—Matilda.
In a way, what Daniel had done, into a small jar in Wigmore Street all those years ago, and what those mysterious women who’d used his sperm had done, had subverted the natural order of things. Maybe there was meant to be a preordained pattern to these things, a vast human dance, if you like; take your partner by the hand and then make a baby, take that baby by the hand and make another one, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. Where did anonymous sperm donation fit into that dance? Maybe what Maggie had set into motion tonight was a way of rechoreographing the dance, of joining up the dots, of normalizing something distinctly unnatural.
Maggie pulled Matilda’s cover up around her chest and resisted the temptation to stroke her big apple-cheeked face. She blew her a silent kiss instead and then backed from her room toward the bathroom. She thought of the four children Daniel had helped to create, lying in their beds tonight, in places unknown. She hoped that they were as safe and as happy as her little Matilda. She hoped their mothers loved them as much as Libby loved Matilda. She hoped that they had fathers, maybe, or grandparents who showed them photos of their own ancestors, of long-faced men and women in cumbersome clothing, of small children in sailor suits or sooty-faced youngsters outside working men’s terraces. She hoped that they knew who they were and where they’d come from. She hoped that finding Daniel would be just the crowning conclusion to a perfect existence and not the final step in a long and painful journey to self-knowledge. She had started a process tonight on her rose pink Apple Mac, a process that could end up anywhere. She had opened Pandora’s box.
In her bathroom mirror Maggie washed away her happy face of foundation, Touche Éclat and sapphire eyeliner. She had not had a facial in over six months. The Botox and the fillers had long since faded away and her skin was pale and dry. She removed the makeup quickly and efficiently, trying not to look for too long at the old, lonely woman in the mirror staring back at her.
∗ ∗ ∗
A few days later Maggie headed off to the hospice with a small Jiffy bag in her handbag. It had arrived this morning, Recorded Delivery. What a thing to sign for, she’d thought to herself as she’d scribbled on the driver’s little computer screen. What a very odd thing indeed.
She held her breath as she pushed open the door to Daniel’s room. She needed him to be good today. She needed him to be normal.
“Good morning, handsome,” she said, leaning in to kiss his cheek. Strangely the less handsome he became, the more comfortable she felt about suggesting that he was.
“Good morning, Maggie May.” He smiled at her and she knew immediately that today was a Good Day.
“I brought you some Starburst and some satsumas. There.” She unloaded a shopping bag on to his tray and unpeeled a satsuma for him. “How are you today?” she asked benignly.
“I am feeling very young and silly,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the fact that my body is glued to this bed, I would be doing something reckless.”
“Oh, yes”—she smoothed the seat of her skirt before sitting down—“like what?”
“I don’t know, Maggie May, maybe like taking you in my arms and kissing you on the mouth.”
Maggie flushed and looked at him in surprise. “Oh,” she said.
“I never did kiss you, did I, Maggie? All those lovely evenings we spent together, and I never did kiss you. And now it is too late. I am a fool.” He smiled wryly, and then he patted the side of his bed.
Maggie moved herself from the chair to his bed and smiled at Daniel uncertainly. “I don’t know what to say.”
He clasped her hand and squeezed it. “I don’t expect you to say anything. Except I want you to know this: if I had my time all over again, I would have kissed you that night, remember, in Aldeburgh?”
Maggie smiled. “How could I forget?”
“The air was so warm and you were wearing a lovely white . . .”
“Yellow. Pale yellow . . .”
“Yes, that’s right, a yellow dress with your hair tied back. And your skin was tanned and smooth and I wanted to eat you.”
Maggie put her other hand to her chest and stared at him in amusement and awe. “Well,” she began, “I mean, gosh. I had no idea.”
“No, well, why should you? I was . . . too slow. Too cold. I thought my life had run out of possibilities. I thought if I kissed you, you would vomit.”
She laughed. So many things she wanted to say in reply, but not one of them made it to her lips. Instead she said, “Oh, how silly!”
“No, not silly. You are an exquisite woman. I am a damaged man. I did not want to inflict that damage upon you. So I kept myself distant from you. But now, well, the irony, I cannot damage you anymore because I will not be here for long enough to do so, but I am too disgusting and decayed to take you in my arms and do the things I want to do.” He sighed, he shrugged and then he smiled.
Maggie squeezed his hand once and then moved back to her seat. She felt moved by his words, but also unsettled. He had changed the entire shape and flavor of the last year of her life. She had thought herself the hanger-on, the one waiting in the wings to be found attractive by a man she desired. But all the while he had been desiring her too. How different things could have been. But also, maybe, how much more tragic.
“Well,” she said eventually, “I must say, Daniel, that if at any point in the last year you had taken me in your arms, I would not have tried to get away.”
“I know, Maggie. I know. And that makes it even worse.”
“But thank you,” she continued, “thank you for telling me how you felt. It will help . . .” She paused. She finished the sentence silently in her head. It will help when you’re gone.
“Well, it may help you but it will be of no use to me whatsoever!” Daniel laughed and the laugh became a cough. He leaned away from his pillows and coughed into his fist. Maggie passed him a cup of water. “Oh, Maggie,” he said, once he had recovered himself. “What a stupid man. What a stupid life. What a fool I have been, again and again.”
“No,” she said gently, “you have done your best. It’s what all of us do. Day after day. Just our very best. And besides”—she paused, having finally, she felt, found the right moment to address the issue of the Jiffy bag in her handbag—“you’ve done more than most.”
“I have?”
“Yes. You were a donor. You helped four women become mothers. You gave the gift of life.”
Daniel smiled. “Well, this is true, I suppose. Though of course I have no idea what form that life has taken. My children may be rapists and terrorists for all that I know.”
“Well, that’s highly unlikely, I’d’ve thought.” She found the joke a little dark for her tastes. “But listen, I’ve been asked to do something. By the Donor Sibling Registry. They need to test your DNA. They sent me a little kit.” She reached into her handbag and brought out the brown envelope. “Look,” she said, “it’s ever so simple. I just need to swab the inside of your cheeks, with this little stick, and then pop it in here and send it back.”
He looked at the kit with semi-amused interest. “Oh, goodness, so now I am like a brute on The Jeremy Kyle Show! I am to have my paternity tested.” He chuckled.
“Are you happy to do this?” she asked.
“Yes, I suppose I am.”
“And then,” she continued, “they need your birth certificate. I found it at your flat. Oh, and a household utility bill. I’ll send it all special delivery. Extra secure.”
He laughed again. “So this is what it comes down to. Utility bills and bureaucracy. Everything in this life comes down to paperwork eventually.” He sighed.
“We don’t have to do this,” she said. “You can change your mind?”
“No no no!” he said in a louder voice than she’d imagined he still possessed. “No. This I have to do. I need to do. And the sooner, the better. I cannot take you in my arms and ravish you, but I can do this thing.” He smiled. “Come,” he said, “remove my DNA. Scrape it from me. I am ready.”
He opened up his dry, cracked lips and offered her the pink, moist insides of his cheeks.