JAMES QUENTIN WAS holding the yellow post that ran the length of the glass panel beside his seat. He was on the Circle Line. He always liked to be on the seat nearest the exit. He wondered what that said about him. He’d been holding the post, which was smooth plastic and clean, for quite a while now – it had become warm under his palm, absorbing the heat of his skin in a comforting way. He didn’t want to let go. Having left both his job and his home there was no building he could think of spending time in, and no person alive he could think of spending time with. So he had opted for transport.
The Circle Line travelled through the stop he would have taken for the birthing centre, and passed the stop he would have used on his journey home. As each stop went by he found himself less and less able to leave the train. And that was OK by him. He didn’t want to leave the Tube. He would sit here for a while longer.
He was thinking about the last time that he saw Avigail. There was snow, in London. One of the few times in his life he had seen heavy snow in London. It glistened on the rooftops and fell in mini snowstorms from tree branches. The twins had started at primary school and he’d dropped them off before walking to work, the crunch under his feet begging him to stay outside. The snow in the middle of the pavement was trampled to brownish sludge already but at the edges – if he kept close to the wall, under the shelter of the buildings’ overhang – he could crunch through untrodden snow one foot-width at a time. He wanted to jump in it. If it had been deeper he would have. Being outside, the freshness of it all, was making him want to laugh – it was only the knowledge that people would turn and stare that stopped him. You didn’t laugh for no reason on the street. But then, with a bright flash of colour against the white, there she was. It hit him so fast, so thoroughly, that he had not the slightest chance of walking away.
She hadn’t seen him. She was in her long red coat with her multicoloured scarf billowing out behind her, and he knew from her body language that she was about to turn the corner, and then she would be gone. He ran towards her. Her name repeating in his mind. All he knew was this feeling – it could not be ignored. His foot landed in a puddle, splashing his trousers, soaking through his shoe, but none of it mattered. He reached out and touched her arm.
‘Avigail,’ he managed, though it came out as a whisper through his racing breaths.
She turned quickly, pulling away from the unexpected touch. The first glimpse he had of her expression showed annoyance. He let go of her coat. Started to stammer an apology. But then her expression changed, the anger vanished, and he saw her eyes lighten as she recognised him. Her hair was stripes of pink and purple blowing in the breeze.
‘Oh, hello, James,’ she said. ‘It’s been a while.’
She held out her hand, and he took it. Her soft leather-gloved hand in his bare palm, held beneath his fingers.
‘Oh,’ he said. It was all he could manage. He swallowed. Felt a warmth in his chest, spreading through his body. He was shaking now. His knees.
She pulled her hand away, gently, and looked at him. Her eyes, that deep brown sparkling with gold. In that moment, if she’d asked him to leave his wife and children and follow her across the world, he would have said yes.
But at the same time he hardly knew her at all. Not in the way that he knew Julianne. Avigail was brighter than everything else because she was out of reach. It wasn’t logical. In fact it was absurd. The colours of her eclipsed the rest of the city. They eclipsed the sky. He didn’t know how it was possible to feel such a deep longing for something he had never had.
She took a step back. Her eyes were different again, kinder, and he realised he had been staring, standing and staring and reaching out his hand towards hers even though she’d pulled away. A gust of wind blew her hair into her eyes and she pushed it out of her face and held it back against her head. The need he felt for her. For just a touch. Once she had ruffled his hair, as you might a child – he’d take that. Or, another time, she’d grabbed his arm when he was about to step out into traffic. He imagined her touching his face, where his chin curved to his neck. If this was to be the last time, could he kiss her cheek, the way friends did, these days, in London?
She was shaking her head a little, her eyes squinting in the brightness of the sun.
‘Take care, James,’ she said, turning, leaving him standing in a slush of what was once beautiful snow. He felt the colours drain out of the world, her bright red coat dimming as she walked away. So he closed his eyes, scrunched them tight and told himself the feeling filling his body was relief. Nothing would have to change. He could live his life the way he’d planned. He opened his eyes and walked, briskly, avoiding the puddles, to work.
As he thought about that, sitting on the Tube somewhere between Temple and Blackfriars, he was amazed at how he had been able to walk with such purpose. How he’d been able to convince himself so quickly that keeping going was the answer. It helped having something he believed in. He’d lost that, now. He didn’t even have the energy to stand up.
He had wanted to explain things – to explain himself, properly – to Julianne. But he had failed. She didn’t understand. Not about Avigail, and not about the pouch. She thought they were going to fix it. That it was something they could fix. But he knew better than that. In a way, he was glad he wouldn’t be around to see the look on their faces when they finally understood. His family. He wouldn’t have to see the blame in his children’s eyes when they realised what all this meant. That was it, he knew now, that was the reason he’d been lying to everyone. He couldn’t stand the blame.
Even yesterday morning he’d still thought there was an answer to find, a problem to fix. He’d believed – or, at least, had been able to convince himself enough to keep going – that he could find a solution. But he saw it clearly now; what they had been witnessing for the past few years was just the beginning. More babies were going to die. Of course they were. It would start in a few isolated cases in the third generation but soon enough the numbers would grow. Exponentially, he predicted. And what was the cause? He didn’t know. But it was genetic. It had to be. The genetic material so carefully incubated in the pouches was becoming corrupt. Small unnoticeable problems were being passed down, and amplified with each subsequent generation of pouch use. Were the chromosomes developing incorrectly in the foetus? Something like Down’s, but a different aberration, one that had never been seen before. Perhaps it was good that the babies died, he thought, then realised that he sickened himself.
He closed his eyes, as he had done once before, on a street in London, in the snow, scrunched them tight and tried to transport himself back through time. He could feel it rewinding around him. He was a young man again, with an idea to design a new audio system that would let people play music to their babies in the pouch. He was presenting to the board, sweating with nerves, stammering his way through until he got to the videos, when he was able to step back and see the smiles as they turned to applause. He credited Julianne at the end. With a modest smile of his own, a nervous laugh. It was all my wife’s idea, he said. She wanted to play the twins some salsa. And of course a photo of her, with the pouch. The twins, everyone knew, were a sign they had used IVF from the start. The photo was a nice touch of intimacy.
And there had been a wonderful closeness, while they were pregnant with the twins. So different from anything he had felt with Avigail. A sense of combined purpose, knowing that they were both together on this – that they were partners. That was the most contentment he’d felt in his life.
The most desire though, that was before he was married. That was sitting in Avigail’s back garden, not far out of London but at the same time far beyond everything else, on a September evening that was warmed with soft light and skies of a deeper blue than he could remember seeing since. He’d taken her several research reports about the pouch, the monitoring of different nutrient mixes that would be put on the market – actually he’d cleared it with his supervisor before leaving, but he didn’t tell Avigail that. She’d smiled when he handed them over, left them sitting on the kitchen table and led him outdoors. He started to speak but she put her finger to her lips.
‘Eva’s sleeping upstairs,’ she whispered, and gestured to the outdoor chairs clustered around two low tables near the cherry tree, each with unlit candles on. ‘We won’t wake her, if we talk here,’ she said. Although whatever words he’d been about to speak, he had forgotten the second he felt her whispered breath on his ear. She reached forward with some matches. She was in an unusual mood. Avigail was rarely this subdued – she liked to argue, to question him. She didn’t usually want to sit outside watching the flickering light of candles.
‘My daughter was adopted,’ she said. ‘Have I told you that before?’
‘No,’ he said, surprised. She’d rarely told him anything personal, and something like that you would remember.
‘It’s not a secret,’ she said. ‘Eva knows, and that’s all that matters really.’
‘I’d thought … because …’ Well, because she was an activist for natural birth he had always assumed she had given birth to Eva. He’d wondered about the father – been jealous of the father. It was good to let go of that jealousy. Perhaps there was no man in Avigail’s life. But he knew that didn’t mean she wanted him.
‘I was writing an article about how the pouch was changing our society, looking at the change in abortion rates. You’ll know about that, of course. FullLife love to use that one, don’t they?’
He waited for what was coming next.
‘Who needs to have an abortion when they could just transplant to the pouch? But there’s another side to that, isn’t there?’
And he knew that there was. Of course, they all knew about the care homes, about how adoption rates were decreasing as well. The homes were overcrowded already. No one knew what was going to happen to all those children.
‘They have no parents,’ she said. ‘No family. My God, the younger ones don’t even have names.’
He looked down at his hands, thought how to phrase his belief that society was still in the process of change – and that society would work it out. He was a scientist, not a politician. But when he looked up, Avigail was crying.
The sky was darker now, a velvet texture to the evening, and her skin looked luminous. Her expression was sadder and more unveiled than he’d ever seen it. He knew, for the first time, he was looking at the real Avigail. He didn’t think about what he wanted, he just reached out with his fingertips and didn’t touch her cheekbone where it was glistening. She closed her eyes. His hand moved around to the side of her face and gently rested on her cheek, as he reached in and kissed her eyelashes.
It overtook him, all the things he didn’t know, all the ways she was out of reach and all the ways she was here beside him. He let his hand run through her hair as he had imagined doing since he first saw her, since that moment in the lift to the museum. What he was doing and what he was imagining collided as he moved closer to her, unaware of the chair toppling over behind him, kissing her neck, her lips. Her hands were holding his head now and she said his name. It sounded both distant and close, formal but their own form of intimacy, his surname, ‘Quentin’, with a hint of kindness and a hint of laughter. His eyes opened, and he was kneeling in front of her on the grass. Had he kissed her? She smiled at him. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Get up. This isn’t real, you know.’
He got up. His lips felt dry, broken. His hands were shaking. The world was darker, but his longing intensified. He wanted to make it stop.
He stumbled to the door, still clasping onto the yellow handrail, and leaned his head against the glass pane as the train pulled into the station.
The door opened.
But he could not step out onto the platform.
Time had collapsed. He could see in the faces of two utterly different women, both of whom he loved, simultaneous disappointment in him. He could see their pity and feel their blame. And he could remember the extraordinary closeness of carrying the pouch, just as clearly as he could remember the horror of holding a baby’s lifeless hand in the lab. In that instant the pouch was warm and soft and intimate and life-changing and made up of cold inhuman substrates neatly sliced apart in autopsy. It was possible, he thought, to love two people at once. It was possible to feel wonder and horror in equal measure.
Could he be wrong? About the third generation? There was that case, after a stillbirth, when the second baby was healthy …
Could it be something else?
No. He wouldn’t cling on to false hope any more.
He didn’t know what to do next.
Maybe he should get off the train. Then he could jump.
But as the doors closed he edged backwards, into the carriage, and as the train began to move he sat back down, in the same seat he had been in before. He closed his eyes, and the train continued to travel the Circle Line. It could, after all, keep going around like that forever.
Holly still couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe it. Freida would not have run away if the pouch was causing some kind of inherited infertility. If everyone born via the pouch would inevitably miscarry their children … No. Not the Freida she knew. They had to be leaping to the wrong conclusion. What did Eva know, after all? What did James Quentin know? Not as much as Freida. There had to be something else going on. There had to be a way to fix the problem. The pouch had changed everything; it had made society better. For the first time in history, women had true equality.
Beyond York the fields stretched flat and far to the horizon. To one side greens and browns, dull yellows edged with low hedges, to the other, lavender. Holly reached to the top pocket of her coat and pulled out her large, tortoiseshell-rimmed sunglasses. She placed them, carefully, on her face, making sure to free the strands of hair that were caught behind her ears and touching the bounce of her grey fringe. She wished Will was with her. Will would have understood. He would have worn a trench coat.
The day they met she was wearing a white pleated skirt and a yellow shirt, her favourite bright green belt pulled tight at the waist. Her long dark hair was plaited on either side of her face and she was smiling at the boy called William who’d offered to buy her a drink. It was nearly two years after she’d seen Freida give that lecture in London, a lecture that had changed her life, offered a glimpse of a new way for women to live. And just before she started at university – the beginnings of her own new life that Freida had made possible.
‘I don’t need you to buy me a drink,’ she said to Will, full of confidence. It was the first conversation between them, and she knew as soon as the words were spoken that she was flirting. He looked pleased.
‘What is it that you need, then?’ he said.
Holly shrugged, crossed her legs, looked away. ‘I don’t need a single thing.’
She liked his eyes, though, his expression – suddenly she wanted to know exactly what he thought about everything. And to tell him exactly what she thought, too.
‘But I’d like to buy you a drink, instead,’ she said.
He grinned. His glasses were too big for his face. Big frames, like Buddy Holly. Dimples when he smiled. And he wasn’t scared, or surprised, or taken aback by her.
Holly was leaning her head against the glass, pressing her face towards the sea she could glimpse now through the woods, and she was reaching out her hand to touch Will’s knee, both of them talking excitedly, neither of them able to stop touching each other, to let go of that contact that fizzed and sparked like ideas. She had never met a man so open to ideas in her life – and he wanted to try things, wanted to change things. He welcomed new ideas as fervently as her parents clung to the old ones.
‘They’re paying for me to go to university,’ she said. ‘Full scholarship. Living costs. Everything.’ She wouldn’t even have been able to afford to rent a flat without the scholarship money – she’d still be living in her parents’ estate, probably. Going nowhere. The money from FullLife had changed everything.
‘And you’ll be involved with what they’re doing?’
She grinned. ‘I’m going to be living a whole new kind of life.’
With a whole new kind of man, she thought, imagining already that Will could be the one to share it with her. She couldn’t wait to tell Freida about him.
Holly lifted her sunglasses, pushing them up on her head because the clouds were denser now; they were approaching the border and she felt like things were about to change. Opposite her Eva had her eyes closed and her head was bobbing down and up as the train rocked. She looked peaceful. Piotr, though – as she watched Piotr she couldn’t help smiling. She was convinced that he was only pretending to sleep. He was staying perfectly still, so Eva could sleep beside him. And sure enough, as the train rounded a bend, her head slipped down to his shoulder, and there it stayed. No smile flitted across Piotr’s face, but Holly thought she saw his eyelids flutter, just for a second.
As she watched them, neither aware they were in Scotland now, Holly was fairly certain that Piotr was in love with Eva. What she didn’t know yet was if Eva was in love with Piotr. Though she hoped – because she had come to rather like him after all – she hoped that Eva loved him back. Love could be such a kind thing, when reciprocated, and such a cruelty when not.
Freida was delighted for her and Will, at first. Holly had bounded into her office during her final year at university, so sure of what she wanted. She wasn’t just going to donate some eggs for the research – she and Will had decided they wanted to be the parents. And they wanted to do it now. It was going to be beautiful!
‘Oh, Holly,’ Freida said, pulling her in for a hug then stepping back to look into her eyes. ‘Are you quite sure? It’s a big decision …’ She spoke quietly, thoughtfully, under the murmur of excitement that was spreading through the room. Two of her colleagues were there, doctors that Holly recognised. They’d been working on the pouch with the primates, and were leading the team for human trials. She nodded at them both, smiled – and then turned her gaze to the final woman in the room.
‘I’m Sylvia. I founded the company,’ the woman told Holly as she introduced herself – Holly realised that her eyebrows had been raised, and she lowered them again. ‘I mean, Freida and I founded the company,’ she smiled at Freida reassuringly. ‘FullLife. With the university, of course, and backing from the government. We’ll be working alongside the NHS. Sort of in parallel,’ she laughed. ‘I won’t bore you with the jargon.’
Holly shook her hand.
‘You couldn’t possibly bore me,’ she said with her most charming smile.
She felt a part of the team – they all believed in what they were doing. Things started moving fast: a graduation, with her mum there, and Will’s parents, all of them together that warm June day, all except her dad. The incredible moment of trying on the pouch for the first time, feeling it snug and soft against her body, the surge of love it inspired. Will’s face whenever he held it, as he cupped his hand around the curve of their baby in the second, the third trimester.
‘Thank you,’ he said to her, a few weeks before their due date, as they held their hands together to feel another of Daphne’s kicks.
Holly reached in for a kiss. ‘What are you thanking me for?’ she said. ‘We’ve done this together.’
‘We have, haven’t we?’ He grinned, and she reached a fingertip to each of his dimples. ‘But I suppose I meant … I can feel her feet, her hands, against my body. Near my tummy, sometimes, or near my ribs. Do you think she’s trying to tickle me?’
Holly laughed. ‘I think she’s exploring her world.’
‘But then, I imagine not having felt that …’ He shook his head. ‘What I mean is, thank you for sharing.’ He laughed almost nervously and her heart leapt to him.
They had a big celebration, after Daphne was born, at FullLife – a birth day party for Daphne, they called it, but of course they were celebrating more than that. It was a celebration of achievement, of hope, of the future, of Freida’s dream. After the champagne and Sylvia’s speech, Holly found Freida hiding out in the corridor.
‘You should be taking the credit,’ Holly whispered with a grin. ‘You are the one who achieved all this.’ She had been such an inspiration.
Freida just smiled.
‘All I care about is that Daphne is OK.’
‘Daphne is wonderful!’ Holly exclaimed. ‘And you knew she would be. You promised.’
‘You mean Sylvia—’ Freida began.
‘And you were right,’ Holly said. ‘Everything you’ve said has been proved right. You’re my hero!’
Freida laughed at that, shaking her head but delighted all the same, Holly could tell.
‘Now let’s go celebrate, OK? This is your party.’
‘Anything for you, Holly.’
So Holly turned and walked purposefully back to the smiles and cake and balloons, to Will and their new baby. She climbed onto a table to get everyone’s attention and then, in front of all the staff of FullLife, she made a speech of her own. Because she needed to say thank you to Freida, who had changed her world.
The train passed a winding river that glinted between hills of forest. The trees glowed red and orange in the strange light that filled the sky. Overhead there was a textured deep-water grey, not the sharp clear blue they’d had in London for most of the winter – this was different.
What had Eva said to her, that had made her mind sink into itself?
Can’t you see how much you don’t know?
And there was a lot Holly didn’t know. Even now. She wasn’t afraid to admit that – she was never a scientist. She believed in the ideas, though. She believed in her family.
Can’t you see how dangerous it is, when there is so much we don’t know?
Words playing over in her mind, as the younger version of herself suddenly seemed headstrong, foolish – so sure she was right. Her father had called her silly. Had she been silly? To trust Freida, FullLife? To believe that her happiness was something more than luck, that it could be shared? She’d been trying to do something good. She knew that with every part of herself – not just her heart, but with her mind too. She still had all her faculties, whatever some people might think. Images flitted through her mind of Will holding the pouch, so in awe. She gave him that. Karl too, with his thank-you letter. He was grateful, he’d said.
And Rosie and Kaz … Her insides twisted as she forced herself to remember. Why had it happened? It was true that they didn’t know the long-term effects – you could never really predict long-term effects. That was the risk they’d all taken. Would Rosie ever be able to have a child? Could the pouches be fixed? Had she rushed in? Oh, good heavens, had she done all this to prove a point? But no, she would not have her life dismissed like that.
The train was slowing. She felt herself judder against the glass of the window before sitting back firmly, keeping her eyes on the scene outside. Because she wasn’t ready to face the two people sitting opposite her. And because they were pulling into Pitlochry station and the world, suddenly, was dusted with snow. Tree branches edged in white, streets soft with icing sugar. In the distance, snow-capped mountains reached up to the sky, their contours illuminated with shafts of sunlight and deep ravines of shadow, and Holly decided that she was not going to blame herself, as women had been doing for so many generations before her. No, she was not going to blame herself, and she was not going to give up on her better world. Not while there was still a chance to save it.