Typical of Charles to decant his sperm sample into a Fortnum and Mason’s jar. Empty of course, but it had once contained gentleman’s relish, and Charles was, if nothing else, a gentleman; one who had better things to do than mess about taking freshly-decanted semen up to Harley Street. He had a more pressing appointment – negotiating the revision of a multi-million oil contract in Bahrain. No wonder they hadn’t had a baby. Charles was never in England at the right time of the month. He’d be streaking over the Med by now, sipping cocktails on Concorde, while she strap-hung on the tube.
The train jolted, suddenly, and Frances lurched forward. It seemed strange to be travelling on the tube again, struggling in the rush hour, but without her job, carrying a scant two milligrams of her husband’s seed instead of a bulging briefcase. She almost hankered after those old, punctilious, nine-to-five days (more often nine-to-seven), with her thick-pile office and her chromium-plated secretary, when she’d solved problems by her own application and initiative, instead of waiting on the whim of Mother Nature. Conceiving a baby was proving the biggest hurdle in an otherwise effortless career. She had even ditched the career, to make it easier. But the in-tray in her womb stayed strictly empty.
A man got off at Charing Cross and she slid into his seat. She felt she had a right to it, not pregnant (yet), but carrying the stuff of life. She cupped her hands more firmly round the jar, shrouded in its paper bag. It would be blasphemous to drop it, after what Charles had been through to produce those vital drops.
He’d sidled into the bathroom that morning, with the empty jar concealed beneath the Investor’s Chronicle and The Financial Times, and remained there, in nerve-racking silence, for close on an hour. She had tried to concentrate on his breakfast, crisping the bacon the way he liked it and squeezing Spanish oranges into cut-glass tumblers, over ice. She had made the tea, heated the croissants, sorted his letters into Urgent, Personal and Dross. Still no husband.
She had opened her own mail, to try to pass the time – an invitation to speak on ‘Women In Publicity’ at the Graphics Society September meeting; the pick-of-the-month from Classics Choice (Riccardo Muti’s recording of the Cherubini Requiem); a begging letter from ‘Save The Seal’; a plea from the Residents’ Association to use her house and services for their Christmas jamboree. She tossed them to one side. Even without her career, her life was still nine to seven. She was busy, committed, conscientious. Yet, somehow, it all meant nothing. If she had written a begging letter on her own behalf, all it would have asked for was a baby.
Slowly, she walked upstairs to the bathroom and listened a moment outside the locked door. Silence. No heavy breathing, no rhythmic creaking. Not even a tap running, or the cistern flushing, to indicate completion and success.
‘Can I – er – lend a hand?’ she called.
‘No thanks.’ He sounded as if he were refusing the garrotte, or a term’s hard labour in Siberia. He couldn’t be anywhere near it, with a tombstone voice like that. And why be so damned independent? The doctor had suggested that she more or less do it for him, yet he wouldn’t even let her in the bathroom.
She mooched downstairs again. The croissants had shrivelled, the tea was over-stewed. She sat at the table, staring at the tasteful hessian wall, torturing the empty orange skins into a shredded, soggy mess of peel. It was absurd to be so tense, but that sample was desperately important. She had endured all the tests herself and had been pronounced in perfect working order. But Charles had resisted. He wasn’t the type to take his trousers down before even the most eminent of Harley Street physicians, let alone entrust his semen to tin-pot laboratory technicians who had taken sandwich courses at provincial polytechnics. Charles was a snob, even when it came to a sperm count. He should have had one years ago. She was already in her thirties – there wasn’t time to go on relying merely on chance, or luck, or the inexorable vigour of the Life Force. He’d only agreed at all after watching a documentary on artificial insemination, where one of the donors was a drop-out on the dole.
Perhaps she’d been too insistent. She was all too aware of the demands and pressures of his job. Sometimes, there wasn’t even time for routine sex, let alone infertility investigations. Charles’ life was perpetual overtime. But if he didn’t produce that sample, they might as well give up. He was so damned proud, he’d never try again. It was bad enough not conceiving in the first place. Fathering a child was something elementary. Any school leaver could do it, in a ten-minute tea-break, so why not Charles Parry Jones Esquire, MA (Cantab.), FCA?
Frances bit into a burnt corpse of a croissant and put it down again. It seemed sacrilegious to eat, when Charles was struggling with his half of the reproductive process. Or was he? Knowing her husband, he was more likely to be poised on the lavatory, writing a report on Prophylactic Cash Flow Analysis. He hated wasting time. Even at breakfast, he dictated his letters into a tape recorder between mouthfuls of poached egg, and he’d spent a fortune on sleep tapes. Charles rarely had a dream – he was too busy with ‘Beginner’s Sanskrit’, or plugged into ‘Budgetary Control for Micro-computers’. Sometimes, she wondered if he even wanted children. A keen prospective father wouldn’t take an hour to produce a teaspoonful of sperm.
She picked up his Urgent pile of letters, the largest of the three, and weighed it in her hands. ‘Urgent’ meant business. Charles’ work was like a barrier between them. Of course she admired his zeal and energy, his never-failing enterprise, but why couldn’t he devote a little time to his future son and heir, rather than lavish it exclusively on the tax and investment problems of the Western hemisphere? If he couldn’t even masturbate without using the other hand to write a memorandum, then she and their relationship came a very poor second to Messrs Caxton, Clarke and Parry Jones. And the poor unborn infant would be lucky if it even came third. She’d been prodded and poked a score of times in the cause of procreation, poured out libations of blood and urine without complaining, and here was Charles baulking at a trifling sperm sample.
Perhaps the atmosphere was wrong. Shiny white tiles and an impending flight to Bahrain weren’t the most suitable setting for sexual success. She was always nervous herself about him flying, even now, when he boarded Concorde as casually as if it were a country bus. There were so many risks to a man in his position – a crash, a coronary, a kidnapping, a hijack. He was such a solid character, if anything happened to him, the world would crumble in sympathy. She felt strangely light and insubstantial when he was away, as if part of her had been amputated. Sometimes, she wondered if she even existed, except as his reflection. Was that why she wanted a child? A Charles in miniature? He was a big man, in every sense, and had never been a baby himself – you could tell. He’d sprung into the world fully grown, with a schedule in one hand and a computer in the other.
Frances switched on the radio and tuned from Thought For The Day to Morning Concert. Neville Marriner was conducting Elgar. She turned him up louder. Perhaps the Enigma Variations would reach Charles in the bathroom and return him to the task in hand.
‘Christ, Frances! Did you notice how Marriner dawdled through that first variation? Elgar took it twice as fast, when he conducted.’
Charles had emerged, looking enigmatic and impeccable. Six foot of navy pin-stripe, topped by a lean, pale face, with surprisingly full lips. The mouth seemed out of character with the rest of him. It was too sensuous, too curving. Everything else about him was thin and stern. Charles was a straight line. He never slouched nor sprawled. No paunch, no bulges, no moral kinks. Frances glanced at his face – it was utterly composed. No flushed cheeks, no air of achievement. Not even the jar.
‘Nice bacon,’ he grunted. ‘It’s the Cullen’s isn’t it?’
She found the sample, later, on the bathroom sill, concealed behind the Harpic: a few oozy gobbets of greyish phlegm, already congealing in its jar. Could that be life material, half-way to a baby? What a messy, complicated business reproduction was! No wonder Charles was hostile. He liked things to be orderly, and if they weren’t, he made them so, forged or forced them into shape. He’d have preferred to have a baby computer-fashion, feeding in the relevant information and masterminding a safe, no-nonsense, fully automated, remote-control delivery, without all the mess and fuss of haphazard sperm and elusive ova.
Frances gazed around the crowded carriage of the underground. All those seething people were almost proof of nature’s random method. Their parents hadn’t had test-tubes or computers. World population stood at some four and a half thousand million at the present. That meant four and a half thousand million spermatozoa had successfully found an egg and fused with it. Not to mention all the countless million others, in preceding centuries. Why should Charles’ sperm be so recalcitrant? She opened the Fortnum’s bag a crack and stared at the curdled junket at the bottom of the jar. Was something wrong with it? Did it have its own, conservative ideas about procreation or world population control? Or was it simply proud and stubborn, like its owner, too fastidious to scramble up slimy cervix walls into the hurly burly of the womb?
She steadied the jar on her lap, fanned herself with her still unopened copy of The Times. The train was stiflingly hot and had unaccountably stopped between Oxford Circus and Regent’s Park. If there were a breakdown on the line, the sperm would die and the infertility investigations come to a screeching halt. None of the passengers spoke, few even bothered to look up from their newspapers. She fumed at their impassivity. They might have time to wrestle with the crossword half the morning, or goggle at Page Three, but she most certainly did not. Mr Rathbone had stressed how important it was that she didn’t hang about. Sperms were like goldfish – they perished when out of their natural element. She closed her eyes and willed the train to move. It didn’t. She wondered if she could sue London Transport for the murder of four hundred million spermatozoa. Veritable genocide. Rathbone had told her that was the number in just one ejaculate. No wonder women always felt inferior. They simply didn’t operate on that overwhelming scale. The carriage shuddered, sighed, jolted forward twenty yards, then stopped.
‘Murderer!’ she muttered.
The train let out a screech of protest and revved into motion, rattling and pounding into Regent’s Park Station. Frances leapt out with her jar.
‘Splendid, splendid, Mrs Parry!’ chuntered Mr Rathbone, as she almost collided with him in the Harley Street laboratory. He always called her plain Mrs Parry, without the Jones. She wasn’t sure if he were merely absent-minded, or whether he did it in the interests of brevity, or vaguely democratic bonhomie. He looked far too respectable and avuncular to be a gynaecologist, trespassing among women’s private parts and messing about with Fallopian tubes and foetuses. He had short, no-nonsense grey hair, combed strictly to one side, and half-moon spectacles. He shook her hand, whisked the jar away, and closeted himself with two technicians and a microscope.
Frances sat and waited, leafing despondently through Country Life. Whatever Rathbone’s pronouncement, there was going to be a problem. If Charles’ sperm were deficient, he would never forgive himself, nor her for proving it. She wasn’t sure if she’d forgive him, either. But even if it were entirely satisfactory, they were still no nearer having a baby.
Rathbone returned, looking flushed and jubilant, as if he had just given birth himself.
‘Well?’ said Frances.
‘Very much alive and kicking! No problems there. Want to look?’
Frances moved into the inner room. It seemed impertinent to be prying into Charles’ emissions, when he was captive on an aeroplane. She looked. Hundreds of tiny punctuation marks were writhing under the microscope, leaping and lunging in an ecstatic John Travolta dance.
‘Are you sure that’s Charles’ sample? I mean, you haven’t muddled it up with someone else’s, have you?’ Charles was such a controlled and sober person, it seemed most unlikely that he should harbour such giddy, madcap sperm.
Mr Rathbone smiled his eighteen-carat smile. ‘No doubt at all, my dear. Your husband’s semen is eminently satisfactory. There’s clearly nothing wrong on his side.’
Frances sat down suddenly. She was glad, yes of course she was. It was unthinkable that Charles should be defective, even in a sperm count. Charles never failed. He’d won the form prize every year at Radley and then gone on to get a highly satisfactory 2/1 at Cambridge. He’d come third out of twelve hundred candidates in his accountancy examinations and he could play Liszt’s Harmonies Poétiques without even looking at the music. A man of that calibre simply wouldn’t produce sub-standard spermatozoa. So why did she feel disappointed, resentful even? Did she want him to fail? She hated failures just as much as he did. She had married him precisely because he outshone her in everything, and that wasn’t always easy. She had a degree herself, a good one, but it wasn’t Oxbridge. They’d met at a golf competition – the Pearson Mixed Foursomes – but her handicap was double his. They both spoke French, but Charles’ accent was almost imperceptible. They both liked art, but Charles could tell a Canaletto from a Guardi at a glance, even from the back of the gallery. And he wasn’t even smug. He was too serious for that.
‘Well, I suppose it’s my fault.’ Frances swung her handbag angrily against the chair.
‘We don’t talk about faults, my dear. And, as you know, all your own tests were completely satisfactory.’
‘Well, what is it then? We’ve been trying long enough. I’ve been following your instructions like the Bible.’
Rathbone clasped his hands together, as if he were praying. ‘Call it Factor X, if you like. Something mysterious we can’t put our finger on. In ten per cent of all cases we investigate, we find absolutely nothing wrong. It might be the colour of your eyes, the weather, the type of book you read …’
‘Mr Rathbone, I’d appreciate it if you could take this subject seriously.’ They paid him enough, for heaven’s sake, and all he could do was produce idiotic jokes.
‘But I am serious, my dear. I’m often amazed myself at the oddities of medical science.’ Rathbone shifted his gaze to the leather-bound blotter on his desk. ‘Some women are actually allergic to their own husband’s semen. They make immune bodies to it, as if it were an invading germ. We don’t know a lot about it, but it’s one of the subjects being kicked about by the boffins at the moment.’
‘You mean a woman who’s perfectly fertile might simply not conceive because she and her husband were – well – sort of biologically incompatible?’
‘That’s it exactly. And if the same woman had intercourse with a different man, one whose semen she accepted, she might very well get pregnant.’
Frances shrugged. ‘That’s all very well if you believe in polygamy, but I haven’t got a different man.’
Rathbone grinned conspiratorially at the tradescantia trailing across his desk. ‘You could always try the milkman, my dear. I’m joking of course.’ Frances stared. He sounded deadly serious. ‘But – well – it has been known, Mrs Parry. And if you both want a baby so badly …’
I’m not sure Charles does want one. She didn’t say it. It sounded ungrateful after all Mr Rathbone’s efforts, but to have a baby with a tradesman – Charles would expire. He believed in people sticking to their proper stations. Mr Rathbone really was eccentric. He looked like an elderly bishop with his black coat and his pinched, ascetic face, yet here he was more or less encouraging her to couple with the milkman.
‘But, Mr Rathbone – think of all the problems. And, anyway, couldn’t people tell? What about paternity tests and blood groups and all that sort of thing?’
‘Why should any husband bother? He’d just accept the babe as his own. They do, you know. And even if he were one of the rare suspicious ones, paternity tests are still notoriously unreliable – one of those grey areas of great complexity, which can always be obligingly confused.’
Frances frowned. ‘But surely you’re not seriously suggesting …’
‘Of course not, my dear. Just a tip other women have found fruitful – ha ha – forgive my little joke. No, the best thing for you, Mrs Parry, is to forget all about this baby business and find yourself a little job.’
Frances stood up. She found it infuriating when men referred to women’s jobs as ‘little’. No red-blooded man ever did a ‘little job’. But however responsible and arduous the job, if a woman took it on, it automatically shrunk in status.
She’d worked for years, for God’s sake. And in a big job, a man’s job; had only given it up to have their non-existent baby. Maybe that was the trouble. She’d worked too long through all her fertile years, never doubting for a moment that she and Charles would produce their perfect 2.5 progeny the minute she stopped the Pill. Everything else had always gone right for them. Charles and Frances Parry Jones, the perfect couple. She wondered if their friends hated them, those well-bred, well-fed friends, who only said what was allowed in the rules. Who had written all those rules? Was it Charles, or his mother, or God, or the Royal Mid-Surrey Golf Club, or the Richmond Residents’ Association?
Oh yes, they had it all. The elegant house on Richmond Green where they’d moved after their impeccable country wedding. The charming Norman church and the chic Vogue dress. Yet, she’d cried all night before the wedding, and hadn’t even known why. Gone through the ceremony like a puppet, smiling and mouthing until her face ached. It had seemed strange taking on his name. Frances Parry Jones was such a mouthful after plain Franny Brent. (Charles refused to call her Franny.) The name had always weighed her down. Like the house. The expensive, tasteful, dark, funereal house – Charles’ house, not theirs, too big, too perfect, for a pair of newly-weds. All the furniture came from his mother (who looked like a bow-fronted chiffonier herself) – Georgian desks and Chippendale chairs, priceless and uncomfortable antiques you couldn’t loll or sprawl in, and so much labour. Brass to polish and parquet to shine. Not that she had to do it. Charles’ mother found them Mrs Eady, another glum, sombre, unaccommodating thing. They never seemed alone. Mrs Eady in the mornings, grumbling about the rain ruining her washing, or the sun spoiling the furniture; Charles’ gilt-edged friends in the evenings, and the golf crowd at weekends. There wasn’t much of Franny left. Even her career was always overshadowed by Charles’. A Public Relations executive with a flair for fashion couldn’t hold a candle to an international finance consultant. Sometimes she wondered if she wanted a baby only to complete her, to give her a role and status denied to her by Charles. Something which wasn’t dark and overshadowed and antique.
‘Mr Rathbone, please. There must be something else you can do. I’m not a person who gives up easily, you know that. I don’t mind what I go through …’
‘My dear Mrs Parry, conceiving a baby is not meant to be an endurance test. If you could only relax, it would probably happen anyway. There’s nothing wrong with you, you know. Your temperature charts are perfect, you’re ovulating nicely, you’ve had a D and C, your tubes are open …’
‘Yes, I know all that, but nothing ever happens …’ She shrugged towards the door. It was stupid wasting time with this second-rate charlatan. She should have chosen a doctor with verve and dynamism, a man more like Charles. That was the trouble with having a husband like Charles – all other men seemed feeble in comparison.
‘Sit down, Mrs Parry, I can see you’re very overwrought. Look, there is one last thing I could suggest, although I hesitate …’
What was he up to this time? A test-tube baby in a milk bottle, care of United Dairies?
‘Well?’ She strummed her fingers along the padded leather chair-arm. Rathbone was such an old muddler. Even now, he wasn’t looking at her, but punching his pen nib through the larger leaves of the tradescantia.
‘I could perhaps put you on one of the fertility drugs – just for a short trial period.’
God Almighty! Sextuplets crawling over the front page of the Sun, television cameras peering down her womb, their house overrun with nappies …
‘I … er … don’t think Charles would be too keen on a multiple pregnancy.’
Rathbone laughed. ‘No cause for alarm, my dear. I was merely thinking of Clomid. One of the less dramatic drugs. You may get twins on Clomid – 6.9 per cent I think the incidence is, but nothing worse than that.’
Twins? Charlie and Franny? Two in one? Rather convenient, really. Save time, save money. Charles would approve of that. She opened her bag and took out her leather-covered memo-pad. (A present from her husband. Where other wives received boxes of Milk Tray, she was given memo-pads.) ‘Right, what is it? Where do I get it? When do I start? What are its side effects?’
Rathbone needed pushing. He was far too ready to sit back and talk about relaxing. He could have put her on the Clomid months ago and the twins would be almost toddling round the golf course by now.
‘It’s very rarely given where women are ovulating as regularly as you are. That’s why I hesitate.… On the other hand, it may just work. It does seem to make a better ovulation. Now what you do is …’
Frances uncapped her pen and recorded Rathbone’s instructions to the letter. She mustn’t get it wrong. Somehow, she felt this was going to be the answer – a wonder drug and twins.
‘Expect nothing, Mrs Parry – it’s much the best way. Then you won’t be disappointed. And, don’t forget, it’s most important to relax. Try to forget all about conceiving. There are other things in life, you know. Enjoy yourself. Take up a little hobby.’
Little, little. Why was everything so infuriatingly little? She already had a hundred little hobbies – golf, tennis, music, art – the versatile woman who could turn out a soufflé or a fashion report with the same easy flair. But what was all that, when you couldn’t do the one thing that made you a woman? She was just an outward shell – smart clothes, fine accomplishments, but nothing inside. No baby, no womb working for its living, a hollow, a void, a failure.
The sun was shining as she stepped outside. The sky was too blue for London, flecked with little puffy clouds which would have looked better on a chocolate box. Façades again. A smug heaven smiling down on all the world’s misery. It probably smiled like that on Vietnam. Or Auschwitz. Ridiculous to be so bitter. Hundreds of women couldn’t conceive. Ten per cent of all marriages were infertile, hadn’t Rathbone said? Discounting those who had their babies by the milkman. Did such things really happen? She and Charles were so ludicrously sheltered. Charles’ mother pursed up her lips if anyone so much as mentioned the word intercourse (let alone anything shorter), and her own mother thought a lesbian was a type of French table fowl. All around them were murder, infidelity and rape, and the worst any of them had managed in their two combined families was to get a parking ticket.
She crossed the road into Cavendish Square. A blackbird was singing in a tall plane tree and the grass was as bright as the enamelled surface of a Holman Hunt. She longed to lie down for a moment and sun herself among the daisies and the sparrows. But Charles had taught her that time was a precious commodity, not to be squandered. Every minute must be squeezed to yield maximum productivity. She bent down and let her fingers brush against the daisies. She’d squeezed all those minutes and what had she got to show for it – an elegant house, run as rigidly as NASA, a filing cabinet crammed with past PR campaigns, a full diary, and an empty womb.
She left the square and crossed the road into the back entrance of D. H. Evans. She had promised Charles she’d buy him a new umbrella. Charles hated rain. He always cited it as one of the proofs of the non-existence of God. Any sensible craftsman would have made a world in which water seeped upwards into the fields, not downwards on to people’s city clothes.
‘Men’s umbrellas, please?’
She should have gone to Brigg’s of Piccadilly – Charles preferred his brollies hand-made – but she felt too tired to jostle with the crowds in Regent Street. She tried to decide between a Peerless with a boarskin handle and a Fox with a real gold band, both black, both expensive. Another woman was buying a Union Jack umbrella in red, white and blue. She’d love to see Charles holding that above his pin-stripes. Or a Snoopy umbrella which said ‘Just singin’ in the rain’. Charles never sang, except at his Old Boys’ Reunion Dinner, once a year. She took the Peerless.
She stood by the escalator, reluctant to go home. Charles would phone from Bahrain – a brief, formal phone call – yes, the flight had been fine; yes, he was tired; no, he hadn’t had time for sight-seeing.
‘Goodbye, darling.’
‘’Bye.’
‘Love you.’
‘Love you too.’
The formula, then silence. The house to herself. Piano practice or an educational cassette. Cooking for the freezer or brushing up her bridge. Preparing that speech on Women in Publicity, ploughing through the latest Günter Grass. Mustn’t waste a moment. Charles had it all worked out. Günter Grass wasn’t waste, but Herman Hesse was. (Charles hated wishy-washy, unsubstantiated mysticism.) A Stravinsky concert counted, but Malcolm Arnold didn’t. She felt he marked her like a teacher. Three gold stars for practising her Bach. Two black crosses for yawning through Proust. It wasn’t all bad. It gave life a point and purpose. Charles swept her and the house into his own inimitable system, so that everything was certain, predictable and tidy. Charles ran his existence by a system of colour-coded notebooks – black for petty cash and bills outstanding, brown for household maintenance, green for his yearly gardening plan. There was even a crimson-coloured notebook for Christmas, with a countdown to the 25th, and a birthdays and anniversaries book, so they’d never forget a date or lose a friend; a check-list for holidays and hospitals; a household inventory; and a filing system which took up three-quarters of his study. Frances wondered sometimes if he had a notebook labelled ‘Frances’ (blue to match her eyes) which reminded him to buy her flowers on Fridays, and check her share returns, and spend three and a half minutes pleasuring each breast before he entered her. He did do all those things, and if sometimes she wanted to scream when he handed her another bunch of poker-faced carnations, that only proved what an ungrateful bitch she was.
She jumped on the escalator. She didn’t feel like going home. First floor, fashions; second floor, coats; third floor, baby wear. She went right on up to the third. The word ‘baby’ was like a magic lure. While she’d been working, she’d hardly considered the whole teeming business of reproduction. It was something tedious and distant, which no doubt she’d get round to, all in good time, when she and Charles had fulfilled their other, more crucial ambitions. But, now, motherhood was almost an obsession. The whole of Oxford Street seemed to be seething with prams and pregnant women. London had turned into an ante-natal clinic. Every magazine was fixated on fertility. She’d cancelled the New Yorker and taken out a subscription to Mother and Baby. She pored over advertisements for front-fastening nursing bras and disposable nappies. She hid it all from Charles. Publicly, she went on reading Stendhal or Sartre, or discussed the anomalies of police pay, or whether the Arts Council was under-represented in the provinces. But underneath, there was a second, hidden life, where she peered into prams and studied her monthly cycle like a secret vice. She was almost ashamed of it. Women weren’t meant to want babies any more – only equality, and freedom and leisure. She had all those. Sometimes she suspected it wasn’t even the baby she wanted, but the pregnancy itself, that essential, biological badge of womanhood, whatever the libbers said. A unique, almost mystical experience that served as your membership card. It was like sex – if you hadn’t had it, you were shut out from the closed circle of other women, a stranger to their conversation and their coven.
And, yet, pregnancy was almost obscene. Frances glanced at the hugely pregnant woman in front of her, choosing a fluffy pink jacket from the display rack. It annoyed her sometimes, watching these casually pregnant women lumbering all over London, displaying themselves in public. This one probably hadn’t even planned it. Perhaps the Durex had broken or her husband came home drunk. Maybe she had seven kids already, didn’t need another one? She looked ordinary enough, pale, with lank brown hair scraped back into a rubber band. But young – you had to give her that. She hadn’t wasted the best years of her marriage, being important and expensive and sterile.
She stared at the woman’s stomach – vast, disgusting almost. Unthinkable to look like that. She herself was small and slim, with tiny hands and feet, and not a trace of flab. She had her weak points, of course, but at least there was nothing gross about her. A belly like that would be out of the question. She picked up a vest, a tiny scrap of cotton which wouldn’t fit a doll.
‘May I help you, madam?’
Frances let it fall. She was trespassing, had no right to be there. She hadn’t joined that magic sisterhood. She squeezed past the stomach and on into the toy department. Another world apart. She and Charles were both only children, so there weren’t even nieces and nephews to buy for. She stopped in front of the teddies – expensive ones, with real suede paws, cheap ones with yellow mangy hair, enormous ones with eyes as big as paper-weights, and tiny ones for hanging in a pram. Perhaps she’d buy a toy for their baby – to make him more real. If she believed in the baby, maybe she would have him. There was always so much doubt, like with God, and Peace, and Love, and Perfect Sex, and all those other desirable things which never quite happened.
She moved past the bears to seals and otters. Perhaps Charles would prefer a more serious beast – he believed in educational toys. He’d probably have the baby on sleep tapes, as soon as it was born. If it slept eighteen hours a day, as the baby books claimed, it would be a genius before it was even weaned.
‘I’d like to choose a toy for a baby.’
‘Certainly, madam. What age is the child?’
‘Well … still very young.’
‘You can’t go wrong with a bear, then. A nice cuddly teddy.’
It was then she saw the lions. Proud, dignified creatures with magnificent manes and greeny-yellow eyes. A Leo would be perfect – Charles’ own birth-sign and the king of beasts. Infinitely more suitable for Charles’ child than a nice cuddly anything. All the lions were ridiculously expensive, but Charles wouldn’t mind. He insisted on quality, even in a toy.
She didn’t want it wrapped. It seemed cruel, somehow, to reduce a lion to a brown paper parcel. She tucked him under one arm and smiled. She felt a little better.
Frances sat in her Ince and Mayhew chair, with a Haydn string quartet on the stereo, and The Bostonians ready at her side, to read when it finished. Five gold stars. The lion sat opposite, ensconced in Charles’ chair. He looked faintly sardonic, as if life in Richmond Green left a lot to be desired. It was dark, quiet, lonely. She’d go to bed early; always did when Charles was away. She switched off the lights, locked the front door, wrote a note to the milkman. ‘No milk.’ She stopped suddenly, in the middle of the ‘m’. Milkman – secret stud for all Mr Rathbone’s patients, father of a million happy babies. She didn’t even know what their milkman looked like. He came very early, before they were up, and she didn’t pay him in person. He left the bill in a milk bottle and Charles sent the cheque care of United Dairies.
Had Mr Rathbone been serious? He sounded it. When he was joking, he pushed his spectacles half-way down his nose and put his funny face on. She hadn’t seen a trace of it. Would other women really take chances like that, risking random fathers for their children? How could you ever find out? People never said anything except what was allowed in the rules. In their set, it was always Sunday supplement conversation – David Hockney’s latest swimming pools, the new Buńuel at the Curzon, the test score, the Third World. But not their own world. Nothing lower than their heads. All the rest was unknown territory. Even with people one was closest to, her parents, for example. In thirty odd years, they’d never talked about anything personal. Her mother could be frigid and her father suicidal, for all she knew. They stuck carefully to safe, uncensored subjects – the pros and cons of organic fertilizer, why the National Trust should increase its admission fees. Charles was even worse. He kept his feelings in a safe, double-locked behind a steel wall, and only let them out occasionally, in meagre dribs and drabs; then banged the door tight shut again. She had never seen him cry. He rarely even shouted.
And, yet, she couldn’t imagine a baby that wasn’t nine-tenths Charles. It was always a boy, with Charles’ straight, fair hair and full lips, with his tidiness, his order, his punctuality. No Parry Jones baby would dribble or doze, or mess up its nappies, or arrive off schedule.
Perhaps it would be better to have a baby by the milkman. A normal, messy, uninhibited infant, with no ambition. Sometimes she longed to be like that herself. But she had always been ordered and ambitious. She couldn’t blame Charles. He’d simply made her worse.
She rummaged in her bag and found the small white tablets Rathbone had prescribed for her. ‘CLOMID‘ said the label. They looked more like humble aspirin than a wonder fertility drug. By some strange coincidence, it was exactly the right day to begin the course, the fifth day of her cycle. Perhaps it was a sign. She swallowed a tablet with a glass of milk. Milk – with any luck, she’d be ordering more in future. She screwed up her note to the milkman and started another.
‘Please ring.’