Jane, Julie, Gina and Alice.
Jane went home and announced: ‘I’ve lost my job and I’ve lost my boyfriend and it looks as if I’m going to lose my home. That’s the good news. The bad news is I’ve found a twin. Which means, Madge, either I’m adopted or you had twins and gave one away. I need to know which.’
They were having Friday supper. Jeremy had met Jane off the train, and been late. She’d had to stand about waiting for him in the outfall from Chernobyl for a full twenty minutes. The waiting room had been too full of cigarette smokers to afford acceptable shelter. When her father did arrive, she scarcely recognized him. She was used to a tall, albeit gangling, man. This one seemed shrivelled and shrunk, old. She didn’t like it at all. She liked it even less when he said, ‘I’m sorry I’m late. We have little Tobias staying. Not so little, of course. He’s thirteen.’
‘Who in God’s name is Tobias?’
‘Laura’s little boy,’ said Jeremy. ‘He’s over from Toronto to stay with us. I’m sorry, he’s in your old room. We didn’t know you’d be visiting. You so seldom do.’
‘What a Godawful name,’ said Jane. ‘Tobias!’ She had learned the power of bad temper from Alice, and the value of non-smiling. She practised them assiduously.
‘He always was called Tobias,’ said her father serenely, ‘but you weren’t listening.’
‘I was too busy trying to pass my exams,’ said Jane. ‘Well, it’s a wise child knows its own father.’
But her father did not rise to the bait. She found Madge shuffling round the kitchen, wearing slippers. Madge had a bunion, Madge said. The glass in her pebble lenses was thicker than ever, but not so thick that Jane couldn’t see love for Tobias shining out from behind them. How could she! Madge’s eyes had always shone with emotions that shouldn’t be there: good emotion, noble emotion, masochism triumphant. They streamed out from her in a bright trail of kindly confusion. Now Madge loved Tobias, her rival’s child, because he was there, because he was her husband’s, because she should. How could she be like this and still teach grown people? Didn’t she understand the value of the negative emotions? Have I, Jane, ever understood them, come to that? Would she ever let me? It was my mother made me what I am, and what I am is what I’m not. So thought Jane, as she looked for forks clean enough to lay the table with.
It was the better to annoy and upset, no doubt, that Jane kept her announcement until Jeremy, Madge, Tobias and herself were sitting round the table eating shepherd’s pie – a typical English dish, Jane explained to Tobias, who was a beastly clear-skinned, thick-skinned Canadian lad, very plain, with his father’s shortsighted eyes (no doubt there, alas). By a typical English dish, Jane implied, though did not say, she meant improperly cooked, fatty, stringy, English mince, hopelessly old-fashioned, unhealthy, and awful: even Canada could do better: sometimes Jane felt Madge did it on purpose to persecute Jeremy. After the mince she went on to her parentage.
‘Well,’ said Madge, ‘I’m glad you’ve raised the matter but I hardly think this is the time.’
‘Why not?’ asked Jane.
‘We don’t want to upset the child,’ said Madge.
‘Either he’s my brother or he’s not,’ said Jane. ‘And he doesn’t look like it to me. My belief is I’m adopted. Do I look like either of you two? No I do not.’
‘You’re upset,’ observed Jeremy. ‘You’ll get indigestion.’
‘If I’m upset it’s Madge’s cooking,’ said Jane. ‘Tough old shepherds, these, Tobias. Tough and greasy. A great mistake to cook them, if you ask me.’ Her parents were shocked into silence. Jane felt terrible and began to cry. There was a kind of noise in her ears, as of breaking glass.
‘Dear, dear, dear,’ said Madge, ‘it’s as if she was six again.’
‘She was like this at fifteen,’ said Jeremy.
‘But worse at six,’ said Madge. And Jane had always had a vision of herself as a placid, easy, perfectly well-behaved child!
Madge made Jane go to bed in the spare room with a hot water bottle and sat on the edge of the bed, spare leg flesh swelling over the tops of her slippers, wispy hair awry – shouldn’t she have hormone treatment, thought Jane, but she wouldn’t, would she: she’d say she didn’t want to interfere with nature; what she herself would have said, as little as a week ago, come to think of it. Since she’d met Alice she’d become a great deal less pious, but also a great deal more critical and, she began to see, really rather nasty. Alice had lent her a photographer for a bed companion and she’d found him so boring she’d asked him to go and buy a bottle of wine and then locked the door and pretended to be out when he came charging up the stairs again. She enjoyed that far more than she would the night in bed with him.
Madge said, ‘Well, dear, to tell you the truth you’re not quite adopted: I most certainly gave birth to you: your father isn’t Jeremy: you weren’t quite a test-tube baby: it wasn’t quite artificial insemination by donor…’
‘Stop it, stop it,’ shrieked Jane. ‘This is disgusting.’
‘I don’t think it’s nearly as disgusting as sex,’ said Madge.
‘You always told me sex was wonderful,’ said Jane.
‘A child should think that,’ said Madge. ‘Just because it never went right for me didn’t mean it would be the same for you.’
Jane opened and shut her mouth like a goldfish in a bowl hoping for sustenance, reassurance, information, nourishment, anything.
‘So I must tell you that although Jeremy isn’t technically your father – I was told he was a Harley Street surgeon – he really is your father in essence. What was it Brecht said in Mother Courage? “The child belongs to the one who looks after it.”’
‘Brecht is a man,’ said Jane.
‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it,’ said Madge, a little peevishly, Jane thought, in the circumstances. Surely she, Jane, was central to this drama. All the emotions should be hers.
‘You mean you’ve never had sex with my father?’ said Jane.
‘No,’ said Madge, ‘and he isn’t your father. It’s all a long time ago and I think the best thing to do is go and see the Dr Holly who helped us to achieve you. He made a very good impression. I imagine that what’s happened is that you and this other young woman share the same father. They may have used the same semen more than once.’
‘Taken semen from the same batch, you mean,’ said Jane.
‘Well of course,’ said Madge.
Jane was sick in the washhandbasin: she could not even get into the bathroom; Tobias was having a bath. The rest of the weekend went well enough. She got used to her father looking so old and her mother looking so soppy. She thought perhaps Brecht was right. These were the ones who had looked after her: these were her parents. She felt quite pleased, however, not to have to repress those qualities in herself she had always disliked in her father – the apathy, the sitting about, the slow movements, the grunts as his mind worked, as if some infinitely complicated inner machinery ground incessantly on. She could take of him what she wanted, and simply leave the rest. And the same went for her mother. She need take only what she fancied. She had been so amply served with a helping, she could well afford to be fussy.
She even took down Tobias’s address in Canada and promised to write to him. But she didn’t ask after his mother. She wouldn’t go that far.